This is the second in a series of conversations with voting Americans. Throughout the presidential campaign, The Sun is talking with voters in different regions of the country, sounding .. out the electorate as the two major parties select nominees.
JACKSON, Miss. -- In a small real estate office in the town of Pearl, landlord John McDonough is working up a head of steam about the economy. The newspapers are loaded with help-wanted ads, he says, but nobody seems to want to work anymore. Don't blame George Bush, he says. Blame welfare.
About 100 miles to the northeast of Pearl, out on the bottom lands of the Mississippi River, Lona Franklin hobbles with a cane out the front door of the Issaquena County courthouse in the town of Mayersville, pop. 280. Across all the cotton fields that stretch to the horizon, he says, there isn't a steady job in sight. Don't blame welfare, he says. Blame George Bush.
Mr. McDonough is white. Mr. Franklin is black. While their views can hardly be said to represent all Mississippi voters, their opinions illustrate the state's black-white split that prevails in national elections. In 1988, when 80 percent of the black vote went to Democrat Michael S. Dukakis, 70 percent of the white vote went to George Bush.
Two days from now, Mississippi goes back to the polls, as one of five Southern states to hold a Super Tuesday primary. The racial split will again be part of the equation, and some candidates have already tried to capitalize, such as when Republican Patrick J. Buchanan played to white voters by visiting a Confederate cemetery.
But, first impressions notwithstanding, interviews in Pearl and Mayersville suggest that voting decisions this time will be based on a more complex mix of gripes and worries, a mix that crisscrosses liberal-conservative traditions.
Back in Pearl, for instance, Mr. McDonough seems at first to be a staunch conservative on just about everything, starting with his views on the welfare system. Just look at what it did to a couple of his tenants, Flo and Johnny, he says.
"They have 12 children. Of course, they waited till they had their ++ 12th child before she got her tubes tied, because your Aid to Dependent Children cuts off after that. The government pays me $620 a month for their rent. It also gives them about $1,800 a month in Aid to Dependent Children. They get food stamps and, of course, they get all the free cheeses, baby foods and free medical care. You sit there and add that up; there's no way that is less than $3,500 to $4,000 a month. There is no need for those people to go to work."
Mr. McDonough then opens a newspaper and thumbs to the help-wanted ads. "Look at this," he says. "One page, two pages, three and a half pages of ads saying, 'Please, somebody come to work for us.' The problem is, we have created so many methods of people not working."
Crime touches all
But the more important issue to Mr. McDonough is crime, and on this matter he is in sympathy with his lower-income black tenants.
Most of the 37 homes he rents are in lower-middle class neighborhoods in nearby Jackson, the capital city of about 200,000 people, and he says, "Black people do not have police protection. Period."
He describes one tenant, "a real nice lady with three children. Two guys were breaking into her house. She called 911. It took them about 20 minutes to get in; then they they went in and terrorized her for two hours. Then they wanted to steal something so they could go buy some crack so they stole the air conditioner." The police didn't come until he called the next day, he says.
As a result, he says, his tenants are victimized time after time. "Out of my 37 houses last year, I had 16 burglaries, one armed robbery, two knife stabbings, one ice pick stabbing and two murders. I can't see the two murders as typical, but the robberies are."
Mr. McDonough says he would go for any Democrat who could come up with a solution, but he has yet to hear one, so he's backing Mr. Bush.
On the maps of pollsters and political professionals, Pearl shows up as 88 percent white, and mostly middle to lower-middle class. About half its 22,000 residents make $15,000 to $35,000 per year, and most of the rest make less.
Driving around town, one sees block after block of tract homes, broken up by shopping centers and strip development. On practically every street an American flag hangs from at least one front porch. "The redneck vote" is how one Democratic official, sitting in a Capitol Hill office 900 miles away, described the place.
But the reality is more complex, as demonstrated by people like Ken Adcock. Mr. Adcock is a beefy, curly-haired fellow with a quick smile. He sells homes for a living. He is sitting in the same real estate office with Mr. McDonough and, as various topics come and go, the two disagree often, such as when Mr. McDonough mentions that President Bush "is doing a wonderful job."
"On what?" Mr. Adcock says with a snort.
"On just about everything," Mr. McDonough replies.
"On the war he did," Mr. Adcock says dismissively. "He's just too reactive. He has never laid out an agenda for us to look down the road at."
Mr. Adcock grew up in Neshoba County, which is still best known as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
"A lot of my people came from the Old South ways of thinking," he says. "In my family I'm known as a radical, but I'm not. I'm mid-line conservative. But when I was 17, I went off to the military. I lived in a lot of places and I traveled all around the world, and it opened my eyes to a lot of things I did not know."
Now when he looks at the field of candidates, he's attracted to the platform of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. That is, he was until he learned that Mr. Clinton had avoided the draft during the Vietnam War.
"Now I realize, somewhere toward the end of it [Vietnam], most people, including veterans, said we shouldn't be there," he says. "But when the country calls, you don't run and hide."
He appreciates some things about former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts.
"I tell you what, I think he's the most sincere of all of them," he said. "I think he'd try to do exactly what he says. But, well, sometimes I wonder how bright he is in some areas. And he speaks with that lisp. His energy level and stamina, I worry about that."
He thinks little of Jerry Brown and Tom Harkin, and has been disappointed that Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska never caught on with voters. But what would really stir him personally would be if one of the candidates addressed federal policies that would boost the housing industry. Not only would that help business, he and Mr. McDonough both say, but the housing industry has traditionally led the nation out of recession. They laugh at the Bush administration's proposal to allow first-time homebuyers to draw from Individual Retirement Accounts.
"It may sound good to people who don't understand real estate," Mr. McDonough says, "but we have never talked to any real estate agent that has ever sold to a first-time buyer that had big IRA money saved up."
But their greatest beef with federal housing policy is the government's decision in 1989 to stop letting buyers assume government loans held by sellers, unless the buyer can qualify for the loan on his own. Easy loan assumability had spawned lots of fraud and abuse, but Mr. Adcock says the problems could have been fixed without ditching the practice.
Instead, they say, low-income buyers are often stymied, and that slows down the whole market.
"Now," Mr. McDonough says, "you'll have a middle-income family with a house. When they get transferred to another town, their house is non-sellable, cause you can't assume the loan. So this house goes into foreclosure. Then somebody like me comes along and buys a $35,000 house for $6,000, and then the same guy that couldn't buy the house for $225 a month because he couldn't qualify for the loan, I then charge him $375 a month in rent, which he can pay readily. But the government won't allow him to buy."
Calls but no answers
Mr. Adcock walks to his office and grabs a 3-by-5 index card on which he has scribbled the names and phone numbers of all the Democratic presidential campaigns. He has been working his way down the list, calling to ask what they will do about the loan issue. But it is the kind of seemingly small question that gets lost in big campaigns, and he has had little luck getting past low-level staffers.
The talk meanders back to unemployment. Mr. McDonough's exasperation with the welfare system re-emerges, and in a few moments the guy who says he loved John F. Kennedy and voted Democratic for governor last November finds himself talking about the virtues of former Klansman David Duke.
"You get a man like David Duke -- the right message and the wrong messenger," he says. "And yes, from what I read about him and hear about him, he's probably an atrocious person. But what he's saying is correct. The words are right. If that was coming out of a conservative Northeastern Republican, the man would be elected in a heartbeat."
Mr. Adcock doesn't see things as harshly on matters like welfare, especially when he speaks of the rural areas of the state.
"This goes on for generation after generation," he says. "It's going to take a long-range plan. If you take the adults that are already in their 40s and above, you can't change them. But if the children were taken care of healthwise and were educated properly right on through, it would take probably one cycle. It would take 10 years of sticking to the program."
With that kind of a solution in mind, he might easily be talking about Mayersville, where, in a population that is 86 percent black, half make less than $7,500 a year, and only 12 percent make more than $25,000.
The town is tucked against the high, grassy levee, which stands as a constant reminder of how quickly life can rage out of control. Lona Franklin, 52, who has come to the courthouse to pick up a boxful of surplus peanut butter, canned corn, flour and butter that the government delivers every three months, says people would work if they could, but the pickings are slim.
"Around in this area here, all you've got is seasonal jobs," he
says. "You work on a farm something like four months out of the year. After that, all you've got to live off of is what you've got now."
Government not much help
Only government programs keep people going, he says.
The economy has never been that great in Mayersville, unless you count the days before the Civil War, when the big cotton plantations boomed and the slaves weren't figured into income surveys except as property. Sometimes the people around Mayersville feel nearly as neglected today.
The government built some nice housing in town for the old and infirm, but that mostly came at the urging of Unita Blackwell, the state's first black female mayor. Otherwise, the last time Mr. Franklin remembers the government making much of a mark was in the 1960s, when sweeping social changes elementally affected his life.
"When I grew up, you wouldn't even be allowed on this courthouse lawn. I lived about a mile from here on a white man's place, with 18 other children, and we couldn't go to school because at cotton-chopping time you chopped cotton. At picking-cotton time you picked cotton. . . . At the time we thought one man was supposed to have it all."
In the 1960s he took part in events that a whole nation watched, driving young civil rights workers from place to place, something not too many people felt safe doing. But national events today seem as remote as the doings of another country.
Regarding the presidential campaign, Mr. Franklin says he doesn't know much beyond the names of some of the candidates. Most of his neighbors say the same. To them, the candidates might as well be shouting to the town from a barge way out on the river, out across the levee and a hundred yards of wooded flood plain.
Issues? There is little talk of them lately, because neither the micro-managing of Washington nor its broad policy moves seem to make a dent in the life of the town.
President Bush? Well, he tries hard but seems a little out of touch, Mr. Franklin says. "He's sealed off. He knows about places like this, but he doesn't come and see the conditions of how people are living, how people get their gas cut off and their lights cut off."