“Nothing’s fair,” Prewitt replied, according to a recording, and walked away.

Prewitt (who didn’t respond to my request for an interview yesterday) had reason to be testy. Initiative 26, until recently considered an easy sell in a fiercely antiabortion state, had just been declared a tossup in a reliable poll. Support for the amendment has dropped 17 points in just two weeks, his anti-26 counterpart, Stan Flint, told me, as the public debate shifted to what it would actually mean to declare fertilized eggs people. It would affect not only IVF, but also ban abortion and many common forms of birth control, open the door to prosecuting women who suffer suspicious miscarriages, and tie the hands of doctors trying to save women’s lives.

Prewitt’s compatriots sounded worried from the stage of the Tupelo, Miss., press conference. “I thought we would have won easily two months ago, but there’s been so much distortion, lies told, and some people believe them,” said Donald Wildmon, whose American Family Association helped take Initiative 26 (relatively) mainstream. “We’ll wait and see and we’ll pray that tomorrow will be a good day.”

No one was as upset as Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, despite the fact that the same polling that found Personhood too close to call also predicted he would be elected governor of Mississippi today. ”You’ve heard some very complex television and radio ads lately that say that these men here and many of the women that join us … somehow want to do harm to women,” he fumed. “Let’s just call it what it is, it’s wild and crazy. But that’s what the other side must do whenever we stand up for life and say, it’s simple, that child in the womb after conception has the same basic human rights as you and I.”

Bryant went so far as to compare the issue to the Holocaust and the Jews of Nazi Germany “being marched into the oven,” because of “the people who were in charge of the government at that time.” He described the ballot measure as “a battle of good or evil,” and warned, “the evil dark side that exists in this world is taking hold. And they’re saying, what we want you to be able to do is continue to extinguish innocent life. You see, if we could do that, Satan wins.”

Presumably referring to Christian leaders who have opposed or declined to support the measure, including the state’s Catholic and Episcopal bishops and a Baptist pastor in Greenville, Miss., who wrote a letter saying, “I’m a Christian and I love Jesus … I’m pro-life and against abortion … and I love Mississippi … but I’ll be voting NO on Initiative 26,” Bryant finished, ”Those who are out there and say, ‘I don’t know, it just seems too complex for me,’ remember this: You’re on the side of the lie. You’re on the side of taking the lives of innocent children. It is no more complex than that.”

Notably absent from the event was Haley Barbour, the current Mississippi governor, who last week inexplicably gambled some of his massive popularity in the state by first expressing doubts on Initiative 26, then saying he’d voted for it anyway by absentee ballot. In the interim, he was blasted by Personhood USA for being in the pocket of abortion-pill makers and turned into a robocall for the anti-26 side (which he later demanded, successfully, that they stop running).

Though a press release had been sent out for yesterday’s event, and the lineup included U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker and Rep. Alan Nunnelee, there also seemed to be no reporters present. The only questions were asked by Alan-Michael White, a smart-ass student at the University of Mississippi who recorded the media availability, and Hemmins, who asked Bryant how he could deny her, a rape survivor, autonomy over her body. “What I could never understand, because this is so personal to me, is why can’t you men have any sympathy for me as a rape victim?” she said. “All your sympathy goes to a fertilized egg. You can’t even see it yet … But we’re here and we’re real people and we deserve to make decisions with our own bodies.”

Strangely, this is where Bryant eventually yielded some ground. “To believe that somehow a judge would say, ‘I’m going to prosecute this rape victim,’ I think is beyond anyone’s reasonable ability in a real world instance to say that that’s going to happen,” he said, declining to elaborate how judges might decide to give one-time passes to “murders.”

The press conference came to a close with Hemmins’ friend Elizabeth Feder Hosey objecting, emotionally, to being “likened to Satan,” and how her “daughter is going to grow up in a state that doesn’t value her.” She shouted, “Mississippi mothers are not evil, we are not Hitler. You look me in the eye, Phil Bryant, you tell me I’m evil! You never carried a child.”

Meanwhile, Personhood USA, which made a significant investment in trying to get Mississippi to pass the first ever such amendment to try to flout Roe v. Wade, was trying to use similar rhetoric. “Increasingly, the American people are being treated paternalistically by a government, media and public sector elite that stands in direct opposition to our traditional American values,” wrote Gualberto Garcia Jones in USA Today. He continued, “Using the courts as its instrument, this American elite has emasculated a once independent America.”

On one level, it’s easy to see why Barbour is backing out now. The burden of his tone deaf (and worse) comments on race and his home state’s fraught racial history posed two serious problems for him: (1) In a general election campaign against America’s first black president, they might distract from or overshadow his and his party’s preferred message; (2) The prospect of (1) threatened to cost him primary season support from the conservative establishment — which might not have a problem with his comments per se, but which is not overly eager to commit political suicide in the ’12 election.

So Barbour, a man with no shortage of longstanding, intimate ties to members of the conservative establishment, has spared himself the potential indignity of being told, day after day throughout 2011 and early 2012, “Sorry, Haley” by one old friend after another.

Still, it’s surprising that he didn’t take a shot. There continues to be an unusual amount of room to maneuver on the Republican side. There is no runaway favorite gobbling up cash and endorsements and leaving the rest of the field in the dust in horserace polls. Mitt Romney may be the closest there is to a natural front-runner, and his struggle to win acceptance from key GOP coalition components is well-documented. Donald Trump’s recent rise in GOP polls — which will almost certainly reverse itself if he persists with his candidacy charade — is a testament to how eager GOP voters are for someone, anyone to rescue them from the uninspiring candidate choices they now face.

Against Mitt and T-Paw and Rick Santorum and Buddy Roemer, maybe Barbour could have found some traction (as improbable as it seems), fared surprisingly well in Iowa, made it through New Hampshire, then made a big move in South Carolina and the rest of Dixie. This is the kind of Republican field in which every candidate (well, OK, not every candidate) can look at his rivals and ask, “Why not me?”

Within minutes of Barbour’s announcement, some conventional wisdom had already emerged: The biggest beneficiary of this news would be … Mitch Daniels, the Indiana governor and Barbour buddy who’s been mulling a run (with David Brooks and other think tank-types pleading with him to get in).

This might be a bit shortsighted, though. Sure, to the extent Daniels was undecided because of his personal friendship with Barbour, this news should make it easier for him to run and (perhaps) to corral some establishment support that otherwise would have gone to Barbour. But another potential candidate stands to benefit far more: Mike Huckabee, who has seemed far more interested in running lately than he did just a few months ago.

Huckabee, obviously, has strong built-in support from evangelical voters — enough to make him the instant Iowa front-runner if he gets in. Now, remember one of the reasons why Huckabee’s campaign fizzled after his Iowa victory in 2008: Too many white born-again Christian voters in the South stayed away from him, instead opting for Romney or John McCain (who by the time Super Tuesday rolled around had become the clear GOP frontrunner). The good news for Huckabee is that, since the ’08 campaign, his appeal to all Republican voters has grown significantly; his popularity is higher today within the GOP than any other ’12 prospect. In other words, Huckabee has put himself in position — at least potentially — to expand his ’08 coalition and to win key Southern states that eluded him in 2008.

In this sense, a Barbour candidacy, with its strong regional appeal, could have been problematic for Huckabee. If he does run and win Iowa, Huckabee would probably then lose New Hampshire handily; Southern, religious-flavored conservatism has never sold well in the Granite State. Thus, he’d then need to bounce back — strongly — in the South. The last thing he’d need is Barbour eating up votes that might otherwise go to the region’s other candidate in the race.

The South’s importance to the GOP is only growing, and so is its sway in the party’s nominating process. And Huckabee may be the region’s best bet in ’12; unlike Barbour, he’s learned to talk about race in a way that doesn’t alienate general election voters from outside the region. If he does run, his prospects of doing so as the South’s candidate just improved.

That is hardly fresh news. Mississippi’s child welfare system has been shockingly inadequate for years. Poorly trained social workers are handling far too many cases, and there are thousands upon thousands of reports of abuse and neglect every year. Many of those reports are not acted upon by the state’s Division of Family and Children’s Services, which the governor controls. The state was sued in 2004 and was forced to agree to a series of reforms. Now, years after settling, the state has not reformed very much:

Except, four years later, that overhaul hasn’t happened. According to the independent monitor assigned by the court to the Olivia Y. case, DFCS, under Barbour’s watch, has struggled to implement the required reforms. A 2010 report (PDF) by the monitor, Grace Lopes, noted that DFCS had missed deadlines laid out in the settlement, and was nowhere near on track to meet the requirements agreed to by the state. While child welfare funding had increased and a new management team was in place, the state was still failing badly. In some instances, Lopes wrote, there was “no evidence” that Barbour and state officials had even tried to comply with the settlement.

In October, the attorneys who had sued Barbour years earlier filed a contempt motion. Of the 119 requirements Mississippi needed to meet by the end of 2009, it had partially or fully fulfilled only 17, according to legal filings. Barbour’s administration failed outright to meet 52 of the requirements, and neglected to provide data to Lopes on the remaining 50, so she couldn’t assess whether the state had done what it had promised or not. The lawyers say extreme measures are now necessary to fix Mississippi’s child welfare system, including appointing a receiver who would seize control of DFCS and force changes to be made. “Mississippi’s court-ordered reform of its foster care system is moribund and children continue to live in jeopardy,” the motion concludes.

“Republican governor of impoverished state does as little as possible to help neediest citizens.” That will probably not ever be a FLASH in Politico’s PLAYBOOK.

But then, Gov. Barbour has a very different idea of who counts as Mississippi’s “neediest citizens”:

“My first year as governor my pro-life agenda was adopted by our Democrat-majority legislature, and Americans United for Life, I am proud to say, named Mississippi the safest state in America for an unborn child,” Barbour said.

It’s a bumper-sticker cliché, I know, but rarely is it illustrated so starkly: Mississippi is “the safest state in America” for a child until the second it is born. At that point, you’re on your own, sister!

Otis Redding posthumously received a gold record for his single, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”. (Not a big hit in Japan right now.)

In 1993: Janet Reno was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become the first female attorney general. (It took longer to confirm her gender than to confirm her law license.)

Ha ha ha! Those are top-quality jokes from Barbour press secretary Dan Turner, who, when questioned about those awful jokes and others, did not even bother to sound embarrassed. Though he did say Barbour doesn’t himself receive the e-mails. Not that he wouldn’t enjoy them! “His sense of humor isn’t so much in the SNL vein,” Turner said. Though, wait, maybe that means he doesn’t enjoy jokes about Janet Reno’s apparently insufficient femininity?

Now, the Clarion-Ledger is spotlighting a separate part of the profile, in which Barbour claims he saw Martin Luther King speak in town in 1962, with both whites and blacks in attendance. The newspaper has done searches of various archives and found no evidence that King came to Yazoo City in 1962.

Here’s what Barbour told the Standard:

“I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

…

I asked what King had said that day.

“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”

King did appear in Yazoo City in 1966 — in the wake of the killing shooting* of civil rights activist James Meredith — but that was a year after Barbour graduated high school, and four years after Barbour said he saw King.

Here’s the Clarion-Ledger’s fact-check:

A search of the King Papers at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and the papers of David Garrow, author of the definitive biography on King, Bearing the Cross, failed to find evidence King spoke in Yazoo City in 1962.

The paper couldn’t find anyone who remembered a King visit in ’62.

I also spoke with Garrow, who is the author of the definitive King biography, “Bearing the Cross.” Garrow pointed out that King was in the Mississippi Delta region in February 1962, and he stopped at several towns. However, Garrow’s papers do not indicate that Yazoo City was one of the stops.

This is hardly the first time the governor has been accused of getting his civil rights history wrong. One of his childhood friends, for example, told me last year that Yazoo City was riven by racial tensions in the 1950s and 60s, despite Barbour’s rosy memories of that era. Meanwhile, Barbour managed to get his name next to “KKK” in newspaper headlines around the country this month after he refused to condemn a proposed Mississippi license plate honoring a founder of the Klan.

The overriding question remains: Will Barbour’s series of missteps on matters of race hurt him in a GOP primary?

* CORRECTION: Meredith was shot but not killed in 1966