JACKSON - At age 51, Mike Moore still has the same boyish look he had when he arrived on the state political stage in 1987, and then for 16 years was Mississippi's hard-charging attorney-general.
Now he's leaving the state payroll for the private sector to support his family on much better money than the state ever paid him. (Ironically, the attorney general's salary has just been raised by $25,000.)
Though gone from public office, in his new job Moore has no intention of stopping what had become his passion as attorney general: helping kids have a better life and avoiding pitfalls thrown at them by modern society.
Mississippi political history should rightly characterize Mike Moore as the rare state political figure who would have been governor if he had run for the job. For anyone else it would sound trite to say family considerations kept him from running. For Mike it was true.
Moore has put himself on the shelf, politically speaking, but that doesn't mean he is done with politics for good. Being a U.S. senator is one job he admits he would someday like to have. And he has time to wait on one of Mississippi's seats coming open.
Would he run against an incumbent, namely Thad Cochran or Trent Lott? "You never know," Moore says with a hint of a chuckle.
Certainly in my 50-plus years of seeing attorneys general come and go, none has come close to being the progressive reformer that Moore was in his four terms as the state's chief law enforcement officer.
Time after time, the slender, wavy haired (a favorite target for cartoonists) ex-Jackson Countian took on unpopular issues, challenged entrenched political shibboleths and battled powerful "untouchable" forces.
And in almost every instance, he won. And the state was better off for it.
Against all the odds, and the opposition of then Gov. Kirk Fordice, in 1993 he put together a team of private outside lawyers to tackle Big Tobacco and seek monetary redress for the industry's years of damage to the health of Mississippians done by their product.
The team of lawyers, after amassing a huge volume of witnesses and evidence, in 1996 remarkably won an undreamed-of $4 billion settlement for the state from the cigarette industry that would anchor state health care funding for years and help bail out the strapped state budget.
Moore's historic case, helped by key testimony of an industry whistleblower, pierced the tobacco's previously impenetrable lawsuit shield and became the model for 45 other states to win settlements totaling $226 billion.
Not long after he took office in 1988, Moore went after another sacred cow, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, successfully suing the corps to halt channel work in the Yalobusha River basin until environmental studies were made to justify the project.
He didn't hesitate to go after fellow Democratic officials and bar them from office for white collar crime.
Moore in the early 1990s forced the resignation of State Auditor Steve Patterson and powerful state Sen. Bob Montgomery of Canton for malfeasance. Meantime, he barred Sidney Barnett from taking office as Southern District public service commissioner for taking contributions and cash from people regulated by the PSC.
While Moore frequently clashed with Republican Gov. Kirk Fordice, the two in 1992 found themselves on the same side on the issue of reviving the right of people to write or strike down state laws or constitutional provisions through initiative and referendum (I & R), a ballot power once held by Mississippians.
But the Legislature cut Moore's appropriation when he launched a move to get the state Supreme Court to restore the I&R constitutional power it suspended in 1916. His move failed. Two years later, however, an amendment to allow constitutional changes through voter initiative was submitted by lawmakers and adopted by voters.
After Fordice failed in court in 1994 to stop Moore from launching his lawsuit against Big Tobacco, the Kirkster attempted to retaliate by running his administrative chief of staff, Mark Garriga, against Moore in the next attorney general's race.
When the results on election night showed Moore had soundly defeated Garriga, Fordice said on TV that it was "the worst day of my life."
State lawmakers now tossing around the possibility of launching a state lottery as a new source of badly needed revenue, likely don't remember that Moore was the prime mover 12 years ago in removing the 1890 constitutional lottery ban.
When Moore moved to crack down on video poker machines as gambling devices and to regulate bingo parlors, lawmakers were prompted to submit repeal of the lottery provision to voters, and it carried by a wide margin.
When Moore had the Jackson County Chancery Court to set aside $20 million a year from the tobacco settlement for use by him to launch his anti-smoking Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi in 1998, he encountered criticism from some legislators and media pundits.
But that criticism turned to praise when his anti-smoking campaign was documented last year to have reduced teen smoking by 30 percent and adult smoking by 25 percent.
Meantime, Moore has won national praise for his work with children through the Boys and Girls Clubs nationally and his establishment of a youth-mentoring foundation named Champions for Children. Reaching thousands of children, the program has provided $280,000 in scholarships to youths who mentor problem kids.
Many Mississippians, especially in the black community, are grateful to Moore for bringing to justice the slayers of two prominent 1960s civil rights figures. They had gone unpunished for 30 years.
With major help from the AG's staff, local prosecutors convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers, and former Klan Wizard Sam Bowers for the 1967 firebomb death of Hattiesburg NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer.
Certainly Mike Moore has left a legacy as Mississippi's most aggressive, activist attorney general with an amazing list of accomplishments.
