The deeper uncertainties that spun the political sphere in recentdays

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"I wish they had a 'Swing Voter' button," said Smith, an Oxfordhigh school teacher who joined a colleague in "playing hooky" themorning of the debate, bequeathing their classrooms to substituteteachers so they could take in the scene. Smith said she had longhoped that the night's debate would clarify her choice, butMcCain's threatened boycott may have settled the matter on its own.If McCain did not show up, Smith concluded, she would probably votefor Obama.
"Oxford has sunk a lot of money into this, and it was McCain sayinghe doesn't care about small-town economies," Smith said. "Planesare flying in and out of Washington all the time. He could fly hereand fly back. You can walk and chew gum at the same time."
Then, as Smith pushed her granddaughter's stroller through thecampus, she learned that McCain had just released a statementdeclaring his intentions. The next plane flying out of Washingtonmight be the Republican nominee's, en route to nearby Memphis.
"Now I'm back to being a swing voter," Smith said.
Until McCain suggested Wednesday that he might not attend ifCongress failed to pass a financial bailout bill, debates hadsettled into the canon of political events whose unpredictables -the well-timed zinger, the fumbled answer, the question no oneanticipated - are supposed to be easily calculated.
The deeper uncertainties that spun the political sphere in recentdays, the notion that the debate might never happen, were feltacutely in this county seat known for quaintness and literature,home to a university famous for the violence that surrounded itsforced integration by federal troops in 1962.
When it was awarded a debate nearly a year ago, Ole Miss welcomedits promise of redemption, only strengthened once it became clearthat one of the two men onstage would be the nation's first blacknominee.
"One of the hopes we have for these debates is that America, andthe world, will get a fresh look at Ole Miss and of Mississippi asa whole," said chancellor Robert Khayat, who was accompaniedyesterday by relatives of James Meredith, the school's first blackstudent.
Oxford treated the occasion as a small-town version of theopportunity Atlanta discovered in the 1996 Olympics: an occasion todemonstrate its broader relevance, proclaim its modernity, andextricate its reputation from the bleakest elements of southernhistory. Citizens marveled at the delicately mowed median runningthrough a freshly paved State Route 6, which now breaksprecipitously from silken blacktop to rabble as soon as one passesthe county line.
"We always felt it would come off, and McCain wouldn't dare," saidCurtis Wilkie, a former Globe reporter, as news of McCain'sannouncement appeared on the television screen in his office at theuniversity's Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics,where he is a fellow.
Outside, the center of campus known as the Grove was given over toa civic-minded version of the tailgating that precedes Rebelsfootball games. Local bands played and political activists(including two separate groups opposed to the genocide in Darfur)promoted their causes. Some students had begun guarding their patchof grass while the debate's future was still uncertain.
"It would have been a different atmosphere. It would have been awhole lot more negative," said Dawn Brantley of the CatfishInstitute, a trade group that had partnered with an Oxfordrestaurant to prepare 1,000 pounds of fried fish for sale. "McCainwould've disappointed a lot of people here."
The teachers from Oxford's Lafayette High School - "La-FAY-ette,"avers Smith, "the redneck version of 'Lafayette' " - said theyexpected to run into some of their students in the Grove.
Both had reorganized their curricula this year around thecandidates' visit: Smith's senior government class had hosted mockdebates, while Ann Thomas's eighth-grade computer-research studentshad looked at election projections online.
"When they called it off, I felt like someone had died," Thomassaid.
"It was like letting the air out of our sails, we're verydisappointed," Smith said.
Smith, who wore only a McCain sticker, said she wasn't ready toabandon her support for his candidacy but acknowledged thatprovincialism could be its own, powerful political cause.
"If the debate was going to be anywhere but in Oxford - even if itwas supposed to be in Memphis - I wouldn't have cared. It wouldhave been, 'You can go to D.C. and take care of our economicproblems," Thomas said. "But they've got to be here, because it'sour millions of dollars."