Yes, Mississippi, You Get to Participate

Mississippi seems to be having the same response a lot of voters in a lot of states have expressed in recent weeks.

They can't believe they have the opportunity to cast a vote in the presidential campaign that actually matters.

I had that feeling in the Texas primary. And, now, apparently, that feeling is being experienced in Mississippi.

"It’s official," says the McComb Enterprise-Journal. "Mississippi is actually going to really matter in a presidential race for the first time in decades -- at least for one of the parties." The paper concedes, in most elections, the state has been "largely an afterthought."

Well, the Democrats aren't treating it as an afterthought in 2008. The Clintons have been campaigning there, and Barack Obama is supposed to campaign there ahead of the primary on Tuesday.

After Tuesday, the public's attention likely won't return to Mississippi until this fall, when one of the presidential debates is scheduled to be held on the Ole Miss campus. The first presidential debate is set for Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss.

Polls show Obama leading Clinton in Mississippi. More than one-third of the population of Mississippi is black, and, in state after state, Obama has been receiving more than 80% of the black vote. Slightly more than 1% of Mississippians are Hispanic, a group that has supported Clinton.

So, based on the ethnic demographics in Mississippi, it's not surprising that Insider Advantage's most recent survey of Mississippi Democrats found Obama leading Clinton, 46% to 40%. American Research Group reported an even larger margin for Obama in Mississippi, 58% to 34%. Both polls concluded their surveys on Thursday.

Rasmussen Reports wrapped up a poll on Wednesday. Obama led that one as well, 53% to 39%.

It's awkward, to say the least, that Obama now faces the kind of scrutiny from the media to which his opponent already has been subjected for many years. A candidate for president should be examined much earlier in the process.

For example, the New York Times reports that, in three years in the Senate, Obama has shown "star power," but his contribution in the Senate has been seen as a bit of a dim bulb.

"[W[hile he rightly takes credit for steering through an ethics overhaul that reformers called a 'gold standard,' like most freshmen he did not play a significant role in passing much other legislation," write Kate Zernike and Jeff Zeleny in the New York Times, "and disappointed some Democrats for not becoming a more prominent voice in other important debates."

Dick Morris believes the race is over and Obama has won. "The real message of Tuesday’s primaries is not that Hillary won," Morris writes in The Hill. "It’s that she didn’t win by enough. The race is over."

But even though Obama remains the leader in delegates, it's too early, writes David Greenberg on the History News Network, to talk of Clinton's withdrawal from the race.

"Like the calls for Al Gore to concede the presidency ... in November 2000, this anxiety about the imagined consequences of a protracted fight misreads both history and the calendar," writes Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers. "In 2000, pundits seemed not to know that contested elections in previous years -- notably the 1960 race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon -- remained officially unresolved until barely a month before Inauguration Day, and so they talked as if each hour of uncertainty brought the republic nearer to doom."

That didn't happen, of course, and so Mississippi is drawn into the fray long after most states have voted in 2008. On the eve of the Democratic primary, some of Mississippi's newspapers are taking sides. The Greenwood Commonwealth favors Obama.

The Commonwealth says Obama is a "a breath of fresh air, running a campaign that has the potential to unite the country and help it move further beyond the racial scars of our past."

Conventional wisdom has been taking a beating this year, observes Mark Leibovich in the New York Times.

"Who was more dead, Hillary Rodham Clinton a week ago or John McCain six months ago?" Leibovich asks. "Whose nomination was more inevitable, Mrs. Clinton’s six months ago or Barack Obama’s two weeks ago? Both questions are of course moot -- if not ridiculous in retrospect (as fleeting as Rudy’s front-runner status or the media swoon over Fred Thompson)."

I think Obama will win in Mississippi. But I think he's got his work cut out for him in Pennsylvania.