Tea Party Idiocy Run Amok in Mississippi

Mississippi and Conservative States - Pigs at the Federal Trough

Not to sound mean, but increasingly I find myself thinking that in order to be a Tea Party supporter one must be either (i) incredibly stupid, (ii) out right insane, or (iii) have had a lobotomy.  A case in point is the State of Mississippi, perhaps the largest recipient of federal government welfare on a per capita basis, where Tea Party loons are pushing to unseat a sitting Republican Senator who brought lots of federal money to the state.  Sadly, Tea Party supporters in Mississippi are not unique in their apparent stupidity.  One sees a similar phenomenon in Southwest Virginia which receives far more state and federal tax dollars than it pays.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this idiocy.  Here are highlights:

Can you hate the federal government but love the money it spends on you?   The electoral earthquake that was Mississippi’s Republican Senate primary has pushed this question to the forefront of U.S. politics.

In conventional terms, the success of state Sen. Chris McDaniel in outpolling Thad Cochran, a 34-year Senate veteran, on Tuesday and forcing him into a June 24 runoff was a triumph for the tea party movement. Outside conservative groups such as FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth spent millions trying to oust a gracious and civil incumbent they saw as far too cozy with Washington’s big spenders. 

Mississippi taxpayers get $3.07 back for every $1 they send to Washington, according to Wallet Hub, a personal finance Web site . The Tax Foundation ranks Mississippi No. 1 among the states in federal aid as a percentage of state revenue. 

Strange numbers, you’d think, for a Beltway-hating state, but Marty Wiseman, the former director of the Stennis Institute at Mississippi State University, explained the apparent inconsistency. “Our anti-Washington politics has been to make sure that we got as much of it here as we could,” he said. “You’ve got the tea party excited that they’ve corralled a big spender, but he was bringing it back to Mississippi. That’s the paradox of all paradoxes.”

Indeed. “If Mississippi did what the tea party claims they want . . . we would become a Third World country, quickly,” said Rickey Cole, the state Democratic chairman. “We depend on the federal government to help us build our highways. We depend on the federal government to fund our hospitals, our health-care system. We depend on the federal government to help us educate our students on every level.”

Cole noted that the hospital he was born in “wasn’t built by the taxpayers of Mississippi, it was built with federal money that was collected from taxpayers in New York and Chicago and L.A. and San Francisco.”

McDaniel, Stevens said, “is always talking about cutting spending. No one has ever asked Chris McDaniel what he’s going to cut.” Stevens added: “Is he going to cut community colleges in his district? Is he going to cut highway funds to his district?” 

These queries will certainly appeal to Democrat Travis Childers, the rather conservative former member of Congress who handily won his party’s Senate nomination on Tuesday. Cochran supporters believe that a McDaniel nomination could lead to the unthinkable. “The concern is that this would open the door for a potential Democratic senator,” Philip Gunn, the Republican speaker of the Mississippi House, told me the night before the primary. Childers’s “chances against McDaniel are better than his chances against Cochran.”

Yes, Childers could run as a Thad Cochran Democrat — except he wouldn’t be saddled with the need to appease an ideology that has to pretend federal spending doesn’t benefit anybody, least of all the people of Mississippi.