State Sen. Chris McDaniel has met the enemy and it is, well, just about everybody.
It’s a given that he doesn’t much care for Democrats and liberals. They are, after all, in his words “dangerous to our way of life.” Gov. Haley Barbour and other lobbyists get him worked up, too. And, he has no use for big government and what he sees as its free-spending ways. In fact, he named just three sitting senators — Republicans Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky — whom he could work with. The rest?
“I’d just as soon trust the first 100 members of the phone book than I would the Senate,” he told a crowd of about 30 in a forum sponsored by the Harrison County Republican Women on Tuesday at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s Jefferson Davis Campus in Biloxi. “I say that jokingly but I’m dead serious. ... Bring ‘em home. All of them.”
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McDaniel is running against fellow Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Mike Espy in a Nov. 6 special election to serve the remainder of Sen. Thad Cochran’s term. But McDaniel is clearly running against Hyde-Smith, who was scheduled to speak at MGCCC on Thursday but canceled because of an unspecified vote in the Senate.
Hyde Smith is scheduled to take part in a forum at 5:30 p.m. at Shell Landing Country Club in Gautier, said Mayor Phil Torjusen, who said he’s sponsoring the event as a private citizen. Other local candidates will be there, he said and it is likely that Rep. Steven Palazzo will make an appearance.
McDaniel said Hyde-Smith is just another member of the GOP establishment, which he says is responsible for the nation’s more than $20 trillion debt.
“Where are your champions now?” he asked. “Silent. Playing the game; dancing the dance. Anything for that donor dollar. Anything to keep the Chamber of Commerce funding their campaigns. They claim they want to balance the budget. When was the last time we had a balanced budget?”
He said Hyde-Smith voted against Sen. Rand Paul’s “penny plan” to balance the budget. And, he said, even though the GOP controls all branches of the government, Planned Parenthood is being funded and the wall at the southern border is not being built. He listed many things fellow Republicans ran against — Obamacare, sanctuary cities and government regulation. Once elected, he said, they failed to keep their promises.
“This is not the party I signed up for,” he said. “I signed up for a party of fighters. We used to stand for the people. Now we stand for the donors.”
Paul Hampton: 228-284-7296; @jpaulhampton
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