Ole Miss basks in national spotlight

Oxford and swing voters get fired up

Spectators waited to enter the theater on the University of Mississippi campus to hear the first presidential debate. (Larry Downing/ Reuters)

OXFORD, Miss. - Sandra Smith walked through the Grove at the heart of the University of Mississippi campus, stopping at each of the tables manned by local and national campaigns and affixing one of their lapel stickers to her shirt. The garment was a testament to conflicted loyalties: John McCain and Barack Obama, side by side, bracketing her heart.

"I wish they had a 'Swing Voter' button," said Smith, an Oxford high school teacher who joined a colleague in "playing hooky" the morning of the debate, bequeathing their classrooms to substitute teachers so they could take in the scene. Smith said she had long hoped that the night's debate would clarify her choice, but McCain's threatened boycott may have settled the matter on its own. If McCain did not show up, Smith concluded, she would probably vote for Obama.

"Oxford has sunk a lot of money into this, and it was McCain saying he doesn't care about small-town economies," Smith said. "Planes are flying in and out of Washington all the time. He could fly here and fly back. You can walk and chew gum at the same time."

Then, as Smith pushed her granddaughter's stroller through the campus, she learned that McCain had just released a statement declaring his intentions. The next plane flying out of Washington might be the Republican nominee's, en route to nearby Memphis.

"Now I'm back to being a swing voter," Smith said.

Until McCain suggested Wednesday that he might not attend if Congress failed to pass a financial bailout bill, debates had settled into the canon of political events whose unpredictables - the well-timed zinger, the fumbled answer, the question no one anticipated - are supposed to be easily calculated.

The deeper uncertainties that spun the political sphere in recent days, the notion that the debate might never happen, were felt acutely in this county seat known for quaintness and literature, home to a university famous for the violence that surrounded its forced integration by federal troops in 1962.

When it was awarded a debate nearly a year ago, Ole Miss welcomed its promise of redemption, only strengthened once it became clear that one of the two men onstage would be the nation's first black nominee.

"One of the hopes we have for these debates is that America, and the world, will get a fresh look at Ole Miss and of Mississippi as a whole," said chancellor Robert Khayat, who was accompanied yesterday by relatives of James Meredith, the school's first black student.

Oxford treated the occasion as a small-town version of the opportunity Atlanta discovered in the 1996 Olympics: an occasion to demonstrate its broader relevance, proclaim its modernity, and extricate its reputation from the bleakest elements of southern history. Citizens marveled at the delicately mowed median running through a freshly paved State Route 6, which now breaks precipitously from silken blacktop to rabble as soon as one passes the county line.

"We always felt it would come off, and McCain wouldn't dare," said Curtis Wilkie, a former Globe reporter, as news of McCain's announcement appeared on the television screen in his office at the university's Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, where he is a fellow.

Outside, the center of campus known as the Grove was given over to a civic-minded version of the tailgating that precedes Rebels football games. Local bands played and political activists (including two separate groups opposed to the genocide in Darfur) promoted their causes. Some students had begun guarding their patch of grass while the debate's future was still uncertain.

"It would have been a different atmosphere. It would have been a whole lot more negative," said Dawn Brantley of the Catfish Institute, a trade group that had partnered with an Oxford restaurant to prepare 1,000 pounds of fried fish for sale. "McCain would've disappointed a lot of people here."

The teachers from Oxford's Lafayette High School - "La-FAY-ette," avers Smith, "the redneck version of 'Lafayette' " - said they expected to run into some of their students in the Grove.

Both had reorganized their curricula this year around the candidates' visit: Smith's senior government class had hosted mock debates, while Ann Thomas's eighth-grade computer-research students had looked at election projections online.

"When they called it off, I felt like someone had died," Thomas said.

"It was like letting the air out of our sails, we're very disappointed," Smith said.

Smith, who wore only a McCain sticker, said she wasn't ready to abandon her support for his candidacy but acknowledged that provincialism could be its own, powerful political cause.

"If the debate was going to be anywhere but in Oxford - even if it was supposed to be in Memphis - I wouldn't have cared. It would have been, 'You can go to D.C. and take care of our economic problems," Thomas said. "But they've got to be here, because it's our millions of dollars."