Dems' road to 60-vote majority goes into Miss.

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

LIBERTY, Miss. - How favorable is the environment for Democrats in the final days of the 2008 campaign? One indicator: They have a chance to win a Senate seat in Mississippi, where no Democrat has won a seat since 1982.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has spent $7 million here, according to Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican candidate whom the DSCC is trying to beat.

DSCC spokeswoman Hannah August said Wednesday that the committee has spent only $5 million so far on defeating Wicker.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has spent nearly $3 million on television ads in the Mississippi race.

GOP allies, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are also buying lots of local ad time to criticize Democratic challenger Ronnie Musgrove, the state’s former governor, who is seeking to unseat Wicker.

Republican Gov. Haley Barbour appointed Wicker to replace Trent Lott, who took early retirement last year to become a lobbyist.

How good a chance does Musgrove have?

Even Republicans acknowledge that he has one significant advantage: As a former governor, he has statewide name recognition, while Wicker, who has only been a senator since Dec. 31, used to represent a congressional district in northeast Mississippi and isn’t well known statewide.

There’s been a scarcity of independent polling in this race. Not privy to the campaigns’ own data, it’s difficult to know if Wicker is in terrible jeopardy, or if the DSCC is simply succeeding in a game of getting Republicans to spend money on this race that could be better spent defending GOP incumbents in Minnesota, North Carolina and other states.

Campaigning Wednesday in Amite County and Pike County, two Republican-leaning areas in southwest Mississippi, Wicker gave an understated performance. There was no sense of urgency in his voice, though his words were dire.

‘Control of the future of this country’
“This is a race that has taken on national implications,” Wicker told a crowd of about 30 people in the drug store on Main Street in Liberty, Miss. (population: 676), just north of the Louisiana state line. “It’s a race for control of the future of this country.”

“Every left-wing group you can imagine, from Hollywood and San Francisco and New York City have all taken up a collection and sent it to this group, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. They have come into Mississippi to run their own commercials, mainly negative commercials, distorting my 14-year conservative record in the House and Senate and urging the voters to vote for Ronnie Musgrove.”

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He added, “Clearly, these left-wing groups see something in my opponent that they like.”

In his television ads, Musgrove defends his conservative credentials, saying, “Roger Wicker and I have known each other for a long time, and Roger knows full well that I am pro-life … He knows I’m pro-gun, too. I have an ‘A’ rating from the NRA. And Roger Wicker knows I’m totally opposed to gay marriage.”

One thing they do disagree on, says Musgrove: “Roger wants to keep George Bush’s economic policies that got us into this mess. And I don’t.”

The real goal of the DSCC and its allies, Wicker told the crowd at the drug store in Liberty, “is a 60-vote Democratic majority in the United States Senate, which would be a filibuster-proof majority.”

What that would mean, Wicker warned, is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi could get the House to pass an amnesty bill for illegal immigrants and then send it to the Senate where Republicans would be powerless to stop it.

Without revealing his polling data, Wicker implied that he is ahead in the polls.

“There’s one thing I know about my opponent Ronnie Musgrove — he plays a good fourth quarter. He’s always come from behind to win. He’ll have to come from behind if he wins this one …”

In an interview after his speech, Wicker said Musgrove “really doesn’t have a volunteer organization, and he doesn’t have a ground game. We’ll see if you need a ground game to win. As far as we can tell, we have not detected a get-out-the-vote-for-Musgrove effort anywhere in the state. It’s all television (advertising), and three-fourths of it is DSCC television.”

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