Transforming movie clips

Ok I am working on a flash map and I want to write a function that will transform the states on the map w/o having to apply actionscript to each individual movie clip.

The way I was going to set it up is like this:

each state is a movie clip and inside that clip is a clip that contains the state artwork and the text for that state. I also wanted to be able to dynamically set the background color, border color and text color for the clip.

can someone point me in the right direction on this?