Not long after racking up the endorsement of MS-01’s biggest newspaper, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Democrat Travis Childers was endorsed today by the Columbus Commercial Dispatch in the special election to fill the seat of now-Senator Roger Wicker:
Travis Childers, of Booneville, is the best man for the job. The Prentiss County chancery clerk has a broader understanding of north Mississippi’s needs than opponent Greg Davis and two others on Tuesday’s special-election ballot.
Childers has business experience, tenacity and proven political skills, all qualities that make him more suited for the job than Davis, who is Southaven’s mayor and a former state House member.
[…]
Childers, a Democrat, is a consensus-builder who’s shown he’s not a strident partisan. Davis, a Republican, has proved to be a negative, anything-goes campaigner.
Childers also stands right on one of the most compelling political issues of our times: what the U.S. should do about the war in Iraq. He wants to pull our troops out within a year or so. We must extract our troops from this bloody and costly quagmire that has killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and wasted billions of federal dollars.
Davis apparently wants to defer to Army generals to judge when, or if, the U.S. should conclude its occupation of Iraq. This is clearly a decision for politicians to make in accords with our system of civilian control of the military. The American people clearly want a halt to this debacle.
Columbus is the population seat of Lowndes County, which supported Davis’ primary challenger, Glenn McCullough, by a 62-38 margin. Hopefully this endorsement might help Childers narrow the edge in this Republican-friendly county. I have yet to see any publication of note in Mississippi give its endorsement to Davis.
Davis and the NRCC are throwing the kitchen sink at Childers, so the results on Tuesday night will be worth watching to see how effective their money is in an R+10 district like this one.
Special election: 4/22; runoff (if necessary): 5/13.
(Tip o’ the hat: Cotton Mouth)
I want to be really hopeful on both these Southern special elections, but I’d prefer to hope for the worst, and then be surprised by something good. Did the same with the election in Illinois, and was able to be pleasantly surprised. At the very least, we’re watching the RNCC spend tons of cash that they do not have.