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This story originally appeared in the Jackson Free Press. It was added to the Mississippi Free Press website in 2025.
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The Marshand Crisler campaign is sending out a rather bizarre campaign mailer using the children’s fable of the tortoise and the hare. The only problem is that this particular fable does not help their candidate. The mailer starts: “We all know the old fable about the turtle and the hare.” Er, do we *all*, really?

You see: Johnson is supposed to be the turtle in this fable. But, wait. Per Wikipedia, in case you’ve forgotten the moral of the tortoise-hare story:

One day a hare saw a tortoise walking slowly along and began to laugh and mock him. The hare challenged the tortoise to a race and the tortoise accepted. They agreed on a route and started off the race. The hare shot ahead and ran briskly for some time. Then seeing that he was far ahead of the tortoise, he thought he’d sit under a tree for some time and relax before continuing the race. He sat under the tree and soon fell asleep. The tortoise, plodding on, overtook him and finished the race. The hare woke up and realized that he had lost the race.

The moral, stated at the end of the fable, is, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

Wonder how much this mailer cost?

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Previous Comments

“For a Jackson of which we can all be proud.”

#147447 | Author: Todd Stauffer | Date: May 16 2009

Yeah, yeah.

#147448 | Author: DonnaLadd | Date: May 16 2009

Plodding – To work doggedly or laboriously.

#147451 | Author: thabian | Date: May 16 2009

Funny, thabian. Oops.

#147452 | Author: DonnaLadd | Date: May 16 2009

Oh, I forgot…. didn’t Harvey pass the Air Force exam…the first time…?

#147454 | Author: thabian | Date: May 16 2009

Poor turtle. There’s a sick photographer out there torturing turtles for Crislers’ campaign. CALL PETA! 😉

#147617 | Author: kaust | Date: May 18 2009

Good point, Kaust. Somebody should look into Crisler’s record on managing his household pets.

#147623 | Author: jbreland | Date: May 18 2009

Plodding – To work doggedly or laboriously. From Merriam-Webster Dictionary 1: to work or act laboriously and monotonously a: to walk heavily or slowly b: to proceed slowly or tediously transitive verb: to tread slowly or heavily along or over

#147740 | Author: Jeff Lucas | Date: May 19 2009

Founding Editor Donna Ladd is a writer, journalist and editor from Philadelphia, Miss., a graduate of Mississippi State University and later the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was an alumni award recipient in 2021. She writes about racism/whiteness, poverty, gender, violence, journalism and the criminal justice system. She contributes long-form features and essays to The Guardian when she has time, and was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press. She co-founded the statewide nonprofit Mississippi Free Press with Kimberly Griffin in March 2020, and the Mississippi Business Journal named her one of the state's top CEOs in 2024. Read more at donnaladd.com, follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @donnerkay and email her at donna@mississippifreepress.org.