What have we learned in the three weeks since Cindy Hyde-Smith and Mike Espy finished in a nearly dead heat to advance to today’s runoff for the U.S. Senate?
Hyde-Smith has a bizarre sense of humor, and Espy’s ethical challenges continued even after he was forced out of public office almost a quarter-century ago.
None of this should make voters too excited about the choice they face in deciding which of the two gets to finish out the two years left on the term of Thad Cochran, who retired in the spring after 40 years in the Senate.
Hyde-Smith was given a leg up in the race when she was appointed to Cochran’s seat until this month’s election could be held. The conventional wisdom has been that as long as the Republican could fend off a challenge from the far right in her own party, the contest would be hers to lose in a state as GOP-leaning as Mississippi.
If she does lose the election, it will be because of unscripted comments she made, in which Hyde-Smith joked about a “public hanging” and about making it harder for liberals on college campuses to vote.
In a state where at least 40 percent of the population equates public hangings with lynchings and other forms of racial violence, and in which some of this same 40 percent remembers how they or their ancestors were kept from voting by laws, tricks and intimidation, Hyde-Smith doesn’t exactly get an Emmy for best comic performance.
As for Espy, one has to wonder whether a special prosecutor’s ultimately unsuccessful crusade to put the former congressman and U.S. secretary of agriculture behind bars in the 1990s taught Espy one of the most critical lessons about ethics: namely, that’s it important for a person in the public eye not only to avoid impropriety but also to avoid the appearance of it.
Two decades removed from that investigation into alleged ethical violations, Espy accepted $750,000 worth of blood money when he lobbied in Washington for the government of former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo.
Espy, at the time of the 2011 deal, both misrepresented how quickly he suspended the contract and how much he was paid before he suspended it.
As much to the point, Espy knew — or should have known — at the time he took on that African nation as a client that Gbagbo was refusing to accept the results of an internationally monitored election and he and his supporters had mounted a campaign of violence to try to stay in office.
Maybe the nature of modern-day campaigning, the 24-hour news cycle, the viciousness of social media and the constant barrage of attack ads by outside groups inevitably leave voters hoping for another option by the time Election Day arrives. It’s not just the commercials, however, that have raised doubts about Hyde-Smith’s racial sensitivity and Espy’s rectitude. Their own words and actions have.
Maybe it’s too much to hope for politicians to be people who are admired and trusted. Politics, after all, is largely about acquiring power, boosting egos and making deals.
Even those who start off nobly thinking they are pursuing a life of public service usually get co-opted by the bargains they strike and the favors they do in order to raise the money that keeps them in office. After a while, their calculations become not just about what’s best for the people they are supposed to represent but what’s in it for them.
Politicians are human. Like most of us, they may not always think before speaking. Their judgment may be clouded by money. Their flaws may be magnified by the microscope under which they live.
But there’s something disheartening about getting to the end of a many months’ long campaign, looking at the ballot and wondering whether “None of the above” is the best choice.
