Republicans and Democrats on the “Red-Blue Mississippi Panel” at the Mississippi Economic Council’s annual Hobnob agreed on one major point about the 2016 presidential election cycle: They’ve never seen anything like it.
“It’s a totally surreal election,” said longtime Democratic consultant Burns Strider, a Mississippi native and former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
Former Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, also former chair of the Republican National Committee, said, “People are mad and they’re scared” as they struggle financially and watch dysfunction in Washington.
Strider wondered aloud whether this election marks a “moral phenomenon” for the country, and said he has felt like he needed a counselor present to talk with his young kids as the family has watched the presidential debates.
Barbour and Strider were joined on the panel by state Democratic Party Chairman Bobby Moak and Republican Party Chairman Joe Nosef. The politicos had a cordial forum on the contentious election before a crowd of about 1,500 at Hobnob. The annual event held by MEC, the state’s chamber of commerce, draws business leaders from across the state to the Mississippi Coliseum to hear speeches from the state’s elected political leaders.
“I think most of the people we know are wanting to keep somebody out of the White House rather than put somebody into the White House,” Moak said.
On this, too, the panel appeared to agree, and all said they wished the campaigns were focused on policy and issues instead of each other.
“I think this year, unfortunately, it’s not that people are undecided between the candidates, but trying to decide whether to vote or not,” Nosef said.
But the panelists disagreed on which candidate can bring the change people obviously want to see in Washington.
“Hillary Clinton being the candidate for change would be like me being the spokesman for Weight Watchers,” Barbour said.
Strider and Moak said that Clinton has tried to run on issues and policy, but that Trump’s campaign has made that nearly impossible.
The panelists agreed that after the election, pulling the country back together is going to be a chore.