It’s been apparent for months that Cindy Hyde-Smith’s strategy to winning next month’s special election for the U.S. Senate is to ride the endorsement of Donald Trump — and not say or do anything that could possibly upset the erratic president.
Since being appointed seven months ago to temporarily fill the Senate seat held for 40 years by Thad Cochran, Hyde-Smith has voted the Trump line 100 percent of the time.
She boasts that one of the big reasons Gov. Phil Bryant, a major Trump cheerleader, appointed her was that she could be counted on as a “reliable conservative vote” for the president.
In a 30-minute interview last week, the closest I could get Mississippi’s first female U.S. senator to criticize the president’s history with and conduct toward women — his multiple marriages, numerous reported affairs, disparaging remarks about their appearance — was to say she wouldn’t use the language he does. She told me that she could only judge the president on his behavior toward her, which has been above reproach.
“I understand that he has not called you any names,” I said to Hyde-Smith, “but you’ve seen his tweets where he has called other women names. Horseface, saying things about their bodily functions. Fat, pig, dogs. You’ve seen all that. What is your response to that?”
“I cannot speak to what President Trump, what his opinions are,” she responded.
“So is it OK?”
“I would not do it. Personally I would not do it.”
This was the first time I’ve had a sit-down conversation with Hyde-Smith, the former state legislator who served as Mississippi’s agriculture commissioner before her elevation to the Senate.
I came away underwhelmed. Her logic was flawed on some issues, and she didn’t seem all that well versed on others.
She said she was in favor of maintaining Obamacare’s prohibition against insurers excluding pre-existing conditions or charging exorbitant amounts to cover them, but she had no solid ideas how to pay for this — a predicament since Republicans have undermined the insurance mandate that had previously required the healthy to subsidize covering the unhealthy.
I asked her whether she thought Mississippi was making a mistake to not expand Medicaid to cover the working poor, which would lessen the cost of uncompensated care with which hospitals have struggled. She said she continues to be against the Medicaid expansion in her home state because it would add to the federal debt.
That’s a bizarre argument to make. Mississippi is missing out on about $1 billion a year from Washington that would create thousands of health-care jobs and shore up hospitals that are hemorrhaging. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the states are taking this money, concluding rightfully that as long as the federal government is willing to pay 90 percent or more of the cost of insuring the uninsured, it would be stupid not to accept it. Not coincidentally, the economies in these states, some of them controlled by Republicans, have rebounded faster and stronger from the Great Recession than Mississippi’s.
Although Hyde-Smith sounds like a deficit hawk when it comes to helping out those toward the bottom of the economic ladder, she’s all for piling up the red ink for the well-to-do. She claims the tax cuts enacted late last year primed the pump for the country’s current economic expansion. She says nary a word, though, about the explosion in the deficit — up 17 percent, or more than $100 billion, in the past year — which is attributed to those tax cuts and a defense spending increase.
There are some areas where Hyde-Smith makes sense. The Obama administration went too far on government regulation, and a rollback of job-killing federal overreach was in order. She also is promoting letting Pell Grants be used for job training at community colleges.
But most of the things she stands for — or at least the Republican and Trumpian orthodoxies that she parrots — actually work against Mississippi’s own interests. It doesn’t seem to matter, though, in this pro-Trump, heavily Republican state. Hyde-Smith is leading in the polls in the four-way race and likely to beat her probable runoff opponent, Democrat Mike Espy.
Contact Tim Kalich at (662) 581- 7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
