Voters on Tuesday will cast ballots to choose a replacement for the remainder of now-Sen. Roger Wicker's two-year Congressional term.
Travis Childers, of Booneville, is the best man for the job. The Prentiss County chancery clerk has a broader understanding of north Mississippi's needs than opponent Greg Davis and two others on Tuesday's special-election ballot.
Childers has business experience, tenacity and proven political skills, all qualities that make him more suited for the job than Davis, who is Southaven's mayor and a former state House member.
The U.S. House 1st Congressional District covers 24 Mississippi counties from the Memphis suburbs to Clay and Lowndes counties. Childers has run an issues-based campaign across the district. Davis' base, as was evident in his narrow defeat of Tupelo's Glenn McCullough, is the heavily populated Republican stronghold of northwest Mississippi, mainly the Memphis suburbs.
Childers, a Democrat, is a consensus-builder who's shown he's not a strident partisan. Davis, a Republican, has proved to be a negative, anything-goes campaigner.
Childers also stands right on one of the most compelling political issues of our times: what the U.S. should do about the war in Iraq. He wants to pull our troops out within a year or so. We must extract our troops from this bloody and costly quagmire that has killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and wasted billions of federal dollars.
Davis apparently wants to defer to Army generals to judge when, or if, the U.S. should conclude its occupation of Iraq. This is clearly a decision for politicians to make in accords with our system of civilian control of the military. The American people clearly want a halt to this debacle.
The winner of Tuesday's special election will take the House seat that now-U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker vacated in December when he was appointed to replace Trent Lott, who resigned.
Childers, 49, is serving his 17th year as Prentiss County chancery clerk. Putting him in the U.S. House of Representatives would be a fitting promotion for the much-respected and road-tested politician.
Green Party candidate John Wages of Tupelo and independent Wally Pang of Batesville will also be on the special-election ballot, which will not identify candidates' party affiliations.
Tuesday's winner will serve the rest of the congressional term that expires in January. However — with the four candidates also on the ballot in November in an unusual electoral quirk — the 1st District's new representative will try to hurriedly prove himself worthy of being re-elected for the next term. Let's give Childers that chance on Tuesday.
This comes right on the heels of the endorsement by the 1st District's biggest paper; the Daily Journal.
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