JACKSON-Twenty years ago, I wrote that Mississippi's "love affair with Ronald Reagan is something to behold."
That was still the case last week when the nation bid a final farewell to the 93-year-old former president.
What I wrote about Reagan in 1984 was after I covered his last appearance in this state for a beachfront speech at Gulfport. It drew hero worship for a politician to an extent I have never seen in Mississippi before, or since.
Crowd estimates were as high as 34,000. Suffice it to say that it was the largest audience for an outdoor political rally in state history, eclipsing Reagan's speech at the Neshoba fairgrounds four years earlier.
The beachfront rally was a measure of Reagan's popularity in this state as of October 1984, but long before that I had watched how many Mississippians were smitten with the brand of political conservatism of the smiling ex-actor from Hollywood.
Reagan's simple answers to complex domestic and world problems, laced with his repertoire of anecdotes about bedrock American values, had made him a favorite of hard-core Mississippi Republicans even before he burst onto the national political scene in the 1964 GOP national convention.
He first showed up in the state in 1953, when he was going around the country making patriotic speeches, courtesy of the General Electric Theater of the Air. I heard him speak then at the old King Edward Hotel, reciting how far advanced our technology was over the Soviets.
A year or so later when the Soviets sent Sputnik into space before we got there, many Americans were stunned that the Russkies weren't so dumb after all.
Early on it became obvious that Reagan's charm and Hollywood-style conservative rhetoric would make him the hottest political commodity Republicans could bring in to lure conservative white Democrats over to vote GOP.
In later years, Reagan would become the Great Uniter of the Republican Party nationally, but ironically for years his appeal divided Republican forces in the Magnolia State into pragmatic and true believer camps.
Although the heart of Mississippi's 1968 delegation was with Reagan instead of former Vice President Richard Nixon, the realists headed by Clarke Reed held the state GOP delegate votes for Nixon, marking the start of Nixon's "Southern Strategy."
Again, eight years later at the Kansas City GOP national convention, Reagan, by then California's governor, was the focal point of an emotion-packed struggle within the Mississippi delegation between forces backing him and those backing then-President Gerald Ford for the party's 1976 presidential nomination.
Certainly in my career as a political writer, the tense, sometimes angry, showdown I watched play out in a Kansas City hotel ballroom between Reagan loyalists and Ford faithful for the state's delegates remains one of the most dramatic moments of my journalistic career.
Ford, backed by Sen. Thad Cochran, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Gil Carmichael and Clarke Reed, prevailed by an 18-to-16 vote over the Reaganites fervently led by Jackson oilman Billy Mounger, the longtime state GOP bankroller.
Mississippi's delegate votes, made unanimous under the state party's rule, then provided Ford with key votes he needed to win the nomination. History records he later lost the presidential election to Democrat Jimmy Carter, who, incidentally, became the last Democrat to carry Mississippi.
But the redoubtable Reagan reversed all that in 1980, when he finally captured the GOP nomination. Then, he went on to solidly defeat the hard-luck Carter, who was plagued by an OPEC oil-driven inflation spiral and 53 American hostages held in Iran. In retrospect, it's somewhat amazing that Reagan won Mississippi by only 1 percent of the vote.
Unexpectedly, Mississippi in that campaign became a focal point for later criticism that Reagan was insensitive to civil rights causes held dear by African Americans and the needs of poor blacks.
Reagan had been persuaded to make his first post-nomination speech in Mississippi at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds near Philadelphia, only a couple miles from where the bodies of three slain civil rights were found in 1964. Yet, Reagan made no mention of the slayings that had shocked the national conscience and prompted a huge FBI investigation.
However, as was noted in the national press, Reagan spoke approvingly about states' rights, long regarded by the South as a code word for racial segregation. Coupled with his "welfare queen" assertion during his campaign, Reagan became a racially polarizing figure despite his genial nature.
Reagan's brand of conservatism, as I had written back in 1984, had a phenomenal appeal to a generation of young Mississippians, and I predicted it would be a portent of state politics in the future.
Now, as we see in 2004, Republicans hold offices in this state that were traditionally a Democratic fiefdom. Much of that can be attributed to Reagan's legacy.
Today's Republican office-holders from the White House to the state Capitol in Jackson, however, don't understand what Reagan did about taxes: if you cut them and the deficit soars out of sight, you've got to come back and restore or raise some taxes as he did after his big 1981 tax cut.
While Reagan was known as the Great Communicator, he was also the great compromiser, as Mikhail Gorbachev or the late Tip O'Neill could attest.
We certainly could use his style of soft-edged partisan advocacy in today's arena of political combat.
