September 07, 2008 01:14 pm
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Now that the Republican National Convention has wrapped it up in St. Paul, Minn., and the world now knows far more than it ever thought it might about Wasilla, Alaska, the focal point of presidential politics is the Ole Miss campus.
Now that the most exciting thing at Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium is once again the Denver Broncos, all eyes are on the Mississippi town of Oxford.
The formalities are over. Running mates have been chosen. The internecine rituals of the vanquished praising the victors have been observed and the process has played out the string. Now, it’s time to get it on — Mississippi style.
It’s on in Oxford
The major U.S. presidential nominees — Democratic Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain — will take their first cracks at each other eyeball-to-eyeball on a Mississippi stage.
The value of the choice of the Ole Miss campus as the venue of the first 2008 presidential debate can’t be understated. Despite all of Mississippi and Oxford’s tortured history from the civil rights era, the spotlight of a presidential debate can only benefit the state in terms of knocking down stereotypes and old perceptions.
National and international media members will now begin a quick immersion in Mississippi’s history and symbols — as well as the state’s ongoing recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
For many, those old symbols define Mississippi and Ole Miss: Nobel Prize-winning writer William Faulkner and Rowan Oak; the “University Greys” — suffering 100 percent casualties at Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg; and the still-visible bullet holes in the walls of the Lyceum made during rioting in 1962 when the Kennedy administration sent federal marshals to protect James Meredith in his quest to become the first African-American student to enroll at Ole Miss.
The ensuing campus riot left two dead and nearly 400 injured.
All the history and all those symbols will be as much at center stage as McCain and Barack Obama debate on Sept. 26 at the Gertrude Ford Center for the Performing Arts.
3,000 journalists
When the more than 3,000 journalists who are expected to cover the first McCain-Obama debate arrive, university officials, city leaders, partisans of both candidates, Ole Miss faculty and students alike know that those symbols — and other vestiges like the “Rebel” flag — will appear in the first moments of television footage or the first three paragraphs of any news story generated.
But with the $4 million-plus presidential debate sure to bring Ole Miss, Oxford and the state of Mississippi under scrutiny by as many as 70 million television viewers, university and city leaders see opportunity as well.
The Ole Miss of 2008 is far different than the Ole Miss of 1962 — and the school in microcosm represents nearly a half-century of positive change in this state.
Debate visitors will still find poverty, pockets of racial unrest and a state still struggling to solve some problems that existed in 1962. But the great difference is that the vast majority of Mississippi now recognize that those problems exist and share a willingness to confront them and solve them.
Republicans and Democrats alike in Mississippi can agree on that point without a debate. But on specifics, the debate still rages.
Contact Perspective Editor Sid Salter at (601) 961-7084 or e-mail ssalter@clarionledger.com.
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