Ellington

When Haley Barbour was running for governor, the national GOP pulled out its heaviest hitters to canvass the state for his campaign. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani all came down on Barbour's behalf, as did both Bob and Libby Dole, J.C. Watts, Ari Fleischer and the president's brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. Each time a luminary would show up, the national media came along for the ride.

It was strange, seeing Mississippi as the backdrop for such political big-wiggery; surreal anew each and every time the coverage came back around on the major news channels. We were in heavy rotation for multiple, consecutive news cycles. Outside of the requisite media cluster bombing around, say, a Trent Lott public longing for a Strom Thurmond America, or a Bernie Ebbers perp walk, we almost never get that kind of national attention.

The question of "why?" must yet be asked. What made the gubernatorial race in Mississippi so important? At the time there was a great deal of talk that the election would be some sort of bellwether on Bush's popularity going into the presidential election season, but that's a red herring. The truth is, Mississippi was securely a "red" state—in the conservative column—already. They wanted Barbour in.

Then, in the orgy of remembrance around the late Ronald Reagan, I recalled that it was in the hazy, heady days of the '80s that Haley first popped into the national consciousness. Very much a part of the "Reagan Revolution," he served as director of the White House Office of Political Affairs before his more well-known stint leading the GOP in the '90s.

A key component of Reaganomics, the "starve the beast" philosophy first gained wide traction with the group Haley ran with then in Washington. In a nutshell, the idea is to starve the "beast" of government spending by cutting revenue, primarily via tax-cut-propelled deficits. The resulting funding shortage requires sharp and often painful budget cuts, effectively shrinking the various government agencies denied the money needed to operate. The ultimate goal of many "starve the beast" proponents is a complete dismantling of all social services across the board.

Problem is, as cuts to Medicaid funding show painfully, many people depend on these services for their survival. Millions of Americans remember what Reagan's storied "optimism" meant on American streets.

Reagan's cuts were brutal and had wide ripple effects. Unemployment swelled, personal debt and bankruptcies soared, home ownership dropped, and the gap between the rich and poor widened immensely. In many American cities the middle class fought for its very survival. There were more than a million homeless Americans waiting for some sort of sustenance to "trickle down" to reach them on the pavement. The unforeseen writhing of a starving beast, you could say.

Dick Cheney, stumping for Barbour, had this to say about the then-candidate: "As we work to keep our economy on the right track, we need good partners on the state level. That's the kind of governor Haley Barbour will be." Dick Cheney also said Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. In fact, back then Cheney thought Reagan's cuts, particularly to defense spending it's worth noting, weren't quite deep enough. The starve-the-beast crew has returned to Washington.

Here's a little factoid for you: for every dollar we, Mississippi, send to the federal government in taxes, we get a whopping $1.89 in return. That's right. We're nearly doubling every dollar we send to Washington. That's pretty good interest. You'd think that with that sort of turnaround, we'd be able to do some fantastic things here in Mississippi. Lord knows it seems like we could use the money.

Yet, somehow, even with that kind of return on our investment we still find our schools ranking consistently among those of the bottom two or three states in the union. There are cavernous new homes springing up all over the state, and yet we still have third-world level poverty conditions throughout entire regions. And while the governor now has a private jet at his beck and call, we're about to put 65,000 more people, the elderly, the infirm, the disabled, squarely on the chopping block.

The GOP worked very hard to get Haley Barbour into office, and there was a reason. He's already touring the country as the tort-reform poster child, out there on his "tort tour" hawking an accountability-free environment for business. The South often plays Petri dish to national politics; tort reform has been worked in to Bush's current talking points, and odds are good he'll be smirking south toward Haley when he stumps the issue from now through fall. We could very well see Mississippi become the proving ground for other, even more grand Republican schemes, such as the privatization of public education and Medicare and doing away with welfare programs such as Medicaid entirely.

The current Medicaid crisis is a wake-up call If Bush gets elected to a second term and the Republican Party is able to retain control of the House and Senate, fiscal conservatives in his party will counter Bush's historic deficits by cutting budgets, across the board, to the bone. With no Senate majority leader to intervene on our behalf, there's little doubt they'll be quick to act on one of the most heavily federal-aid dependent states in the nation. This one. Beware the writhing of a starving beast, my friends.