Word: finches
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...FAILURE of the Mississippi House to ratify the amendment has indeed stirred up a hornet's nest. The members of the House blatantly defied the will of the people personified in Cliff Finch, and the "people" want revenge. After the Mississippi establishment elite has for two years laughed and ridiculed Finch, they can no longer dismiss Finch's adventitious rise to power as incidental or insignificant. On the contrary, Finch's meteoric ascendency can be traced to the changing nature of Mississippi society and the material conditions molding the outlook of its people...
...When Finch Jumped into the race for governor of Mississippi in 1975 he at first seemed, to many political observers, enigmatic. Finch proclaimed himself "the working man's candidate" and adopted a lunch pail as his symbol. One day a week he rolled up his sleeves and worked at various jobs to demonstrate his dedication to the working man--one day he bagged groceries, the next day he drove a bulldozer...
...while obviously championing the members of the burgeoning class of laborers who are divorced from the means of production. Finch is simultaneously tapping the huge reservoir of power seething from the thousands of small landed proprietors whose chief concern is to protect the endangered agrarian lifestyle their fathers and their father's fathers led before them. As the waves of modernization lap just beyond their rickety barbed-wirse fences, these proud and fiercely independent farmers--no longer safely nestled far from civilization in the sparsely-populated Mississippi hill country--turn to a savior, or at least a defender...
...whereas past Mississippi leaders helped forge an alliance between the small landed proprietors and the amorphous bourgeoisie, the sinews of Cliff Finch's power steam from a different coalition of two fairly distinct socio-economic classes-the blue-collar laborers living in the industrial centers of the state and the tenacious Mississippi farmers who eke out subsistence wages on their 100 or so acres of soil. This time the middle-class--the Chamber of Commerce set--has been left out in the cold...
...Finch's opponent in 1975, Gil Carmichael apotheosized the values of this middle-class. Carmichael, who served as a fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics the year after his defeat at the hands of Finch, was urban while Finch was bucolic, articulate while Finch was incoherent, organized while Finch was chaotic, and cerebral while Finch relied on good ol' home-grown common sense. Carmichael--a rich Volkswagen dealer--was the sweetheart of the more intelligent and wealthier 'Mississippians. In the election he carried Jackson, some coastal districts and the Mississippi Delta where plantations still abound and wealth and income...