Bill Crawford was on the front lines of the Mississippi Republican Party when, as that core group liked to say, it was so small that it could meet in a phone booth.
In the half-century since, he has seen the GOP grow into a political monolith in this state, nearly reversing the scales of power with the Democratic Party.
In between, he has come away with a sense of regret that the transformation didn’t live up to the promise of lifting Mississippi from the bottom of so many economic, educational and health indicators, or of doing more to erase the racial divide in the state.
Crawford, who has been providing this newspaper — and many others — with an op-ed column about Mississippi politics and policy debates for the past 15 years, has channeled his disappointment into a book, “A Republican’s Lament: Mississippi Needs Good Government Conservatives.” Published by University Press of Mississippi, it is scheduled for release in mid-October.
Bill Crawford
Crawford has led an interesting life, which has included stints, some of them overlapping, in journalism, government, politics, higher education and banking. He was one of the first Republicans to serve in the Mississippi Legislature in the 20th century. He served on the state College Board during the culmination of the Ayers desegregation case. Until falling into disfavor with the current brand of GOP leadership, he was regularly asked to serve on gubernatorial task forces designed to address some of the state’s major problems — only to watch most of those recommendations shelved by lawmakers more interested in staying in office than changing the status quo.
During the early 1990s, Crawford was particularly unpopular here and in Columbus for being the lead spokesman for a College Board plan to merge Mississippi Valley State University with Delta State, and to merge Mississippi University for Women with Mississippi State. He shares in his book one note he received at the time, calling him “Mississippi’s most bigoted and rednecked man” — an insult that ignored or was unaware of Crawford’s efforts during the resurgence of the GOP to urge its leadership to be intentionally inclusive of African Americans so that it would not become the mostly white party that it is today.
Crawford, while in his 20s, was heavily influenced by GOP trailblazer Gil Carmichael, who came close in 1975 to becoming the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. That distinction would wait four more election cycles until Kirk Fordice, the gruff-mannered Vicksburg construction company owner, broke through.
Carmichael, a car dealer from Meridian, was an advocate for “good government conservatism,” what a later like-minded Republican named George W. Bush would call “compassionate conservatism” during his two terms in the White House.
Crawford took a break from newspapering to work on Carmichael’s campaign, eventually becoming his press secretary.
In his book, Crawford boils down Carmichael’s vision to less than a paragraph: “write a new, moral constitution to reorganize state government and strengthen executive power; run government like a business to eliminate waste, mismanagement, and corruption and utilize those efficiencies to make key programs effective; uplift the disadvantaged through improved schools and better jobs; build a competitive two-party system to produce better government policy; and diversify the Republican Party to pull people together.”
Although some of that has occurred, Crawford sees a lot more that hasn’t.
Carmichael wanted a new constitution not just to eliminate some of the racist foundations of the 1890 document but to more equalize the powers of the legislative and executive branchers. The 1890 constitution was designed to keep governors weak by limiting them to one term and fracturing the executive branch among eight independently elected statewide officials. Carmichael wanted governors, just like presidents, to have a cabinet of officials they would appoint to the jobs of secretary of state, attorney general and state treasurer.
Although Mississippi voted in the 1980s to allow governors to serve two terms, the idea of a new constitution is hardly mentioned anymore. As did the previous Democratic hegemony, the Republican supermajorities in the Legislature don’t want to concede any power to the governor or to the people, as they have intentionally dragged their feet on reinstituting the initiative process.
Mississippi’s embrace of the immigrant-bashing, race-baiting Donald Trump as the face of the national GOP has set back any modest diversity efforts by the state party.
And Republicans, once in power, have shown themselves just as capable as anyone of being wasteful and corrupt.
Crawford’s book, full of the columns he wrote as a participant in and observer of contemporary Mississippi history, is a 200-page wish for what might have been.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
