Hellfire: No, I don't. That wasn't my point. My point was that Obama is not nearly as radioactive as everyone presumed he would be, and that this destroys the argument used against him by many that he would harm the Democrats in Congressial races. And my secondary point was that the electorate -- by which I meant the NATIONAL electorate (of which MS is only a part) is different.

You probably have to be my age (66) to remember what a sewer of racist vitriol Mississippi used to be. Blacks contemplating an long auto trip would go FAR out of their way to avoid it. A 10-year-old black kid named Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 for the crime of whistling at a white woman, and the murderers were acquitted. The murder of civil rights workers was common in the 1960s in MS. "Freedom Riders," students testing the interstate laws that banned segregation on interstate buses in 1961, put notes in their undergarments when they crossed the MS border, assuming they'd be murdered and wanting to notify next-of-kin.

All of that said, in 1997 I watched with my jaw resting on the blackjack table as a black man and a white woman walked arm-in-arm through a Gulf Coast casino. Things had changed in MS, and have probably changed some more since. I doubt Obama will win the state -- the South loves military heroes and McCain surely is one. But the race is going to be a lot closer than it was for Bush in 2000 or 2004.

As someone else notes in this thread, the things Bush has done haven't helped MS's working people at all, and like everyone else in the country, they're losing ground. The day when referring to someone as "black Hussein Obama" can get Mississippians to vote against their own interests may have passed, and this election seems to indicate it has.

The times they are a-changin'.