Mississippi man jilted by GOP governor, but will vote for McCain anyway

September 27th, 2008 at 06:48pm Chuck Sweeny

ON BOARD THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS — A year ago homebuilder Joel Smith from Lexington, Miss., was going strong. The president and part owner of Safeway Homes, Smith managed 150 workers who built affordable, modular houses that could withstand 160 mph. winds. There’s a big market for this sort of house in the Gulf Coast areas of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

Safeway decided to take advantage of a government program to provide provided incentives to companies to construct affordable or “workforce” housing so that average folks could afford to move back to the Gulf Coast as the area rebuilt from Hurricane Katrina.

Joel’s company signed up for the program and built 200 modular homes to be shipped to sites in southern Mississippi, believing he’d be helped. But Gov. Haley Barbour decided to use the federal money — $600 million worth – to rebuilding the state’s seaports, Smith said. Long story short: Safeway had to close its factory. It is now in the process of filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

So, Joel and wife Adriana had gone to New Orleans for a few days to de-stress a little. Yes, he told me, he watched part of Friday’s presidential debate. But he was not impressed.

“If you’ve seen one debate you’ve seen them all,” he said. He’s not enthused about politics, and who could blame him after what he’s been through.

But Smith, 66, will vote, as he always has.

“I’ve been a Republican for 40 years, and I think I’m at a place where I have no choice as to who I’ll vote for. I won’t vote for Obama, and not because he’s black. I just feel his philosophy of government would set this country back 50 years. I feel like McCain is the only chance we have of stopping all he pork barrel spending, and the programs that cause us to go deeper in debt.”

His first choice for president would have been Mike Huckabee, “who has good morals and a conscience. I think he understands the problems we have in America, and when you get down to it, we have a spiritual problem. Just walk down Bourbon Street. It’s so degrading to the female gender.”

He wishes McCain would have picked Huckabee as his running mate, but he concedes that if McCain had to pick a woman, “Sarah Palin is a good choice. She has moral fiber.”

Smith reluctantly supports a bailout for the financial industry, but only because “I don’t know how they can survive without it. It’s a band aid, though. They’ll print more money to lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and J.P. Morgan. They’ll print it, and you and I will have to pay it back, if it gets paid at all.”

Part of America’s problem, Smith says, is that we’ve become an “I’m going to have it now, I don’t care if I lose it tomorrow” society. Both the Republicans and the Democrats buy into this warped philosophy, he says, “and they’re both wrong.”

Smith says “fruitcakes who don’t want to drill for oil” have made us beholden to foreign and often hostile oil producing countries that wish us harm. “T. Boone Pickens has a good idea. We’ve got billions and billions of cubic feet of natural gas and we don’t have to go anywhere to get it.”

As the Smiths prepared to leave the train at Jackson, I wished them well. I meant it.

Reach Political Editor Chuck Sweeny at 815-987-1372 or csweeny@rrstar.com.
SCOTT MORGAN | RRSTAR.COM
Joel and Adriana Smith of Lexington, Miss., wait for the train Saturday, Sept. 27, 2008, in New Orleans, La. Smith’s modular home company, Safeway Homes, went bankrupt after the State of Mississippi redirected $600 million to rebuild ports instead of building homes.

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