Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour may run for president in 2012. If I were his wife, I would put every ounce of my marital capital on the line in my fight to stop him. Governor Barbour would be, in my opinion, attempting a swim upstream, against ghastly, frigid currents, towards a bridge beyond too far.
The reasons why this is so ought to be obvious to any fifth grader with even an ounce of worldly knowledge and a tiny grain of common sense.
I sincerely doubt that Haley Barbour holds any genuinely racist beliefs. But he has made and continues to make comments — in a most Southern, Southern drawl — that have made even this native Southerner cringe. The most recent remarks by the governor were made in a formal interview with the Weekly Standard, which was published a couple of days ago. Already Governor Barbour’s questionable take on his town’s “Citizens Council” has been pilloried from coast to coast in scores of publications. In addition, past comments have been unearthed, one actually putting the words “watermelon” and “blacks” in the same sentence. Enough said.
Like Governor Barbour, I am as Southern as they come, born and bred in Atlanta a mere two generations removed from a plantation in Mississippi. I’m four years younger than Mr. Barbour, which gives me an even better excuse for being too young to have been a segregationist, much less a slaveholder or plantation mistress. But even I have strong, vivid memories of the Civil Rights movement and of the Jim Crow segregation that spawned it.
Two of the first words I learned to read as a young child were “white” and “colored.” Whether at the public park water fountains or the restrooms of any public facility, those words were emblazoned across the South in bold, stark print. Those words are still painful to me in ways that might be hard to fathom by my generational peers from other regions. And I’m white. As far as I’m concerned, one would need to have the sensibility of an orange or be born after 1970 not to feel a sharp pain in his soul over Jim Crow and the whole host of indignities to real human beings because of it.
Governor Haley Barbour, I’ve read, has been a good public servant in a state that has had grave problems, many of them stemming from Katrina devastation. He is currently the chairman of the Republican Governors Association and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. He has served ably in both positions and deserves recognition. But a run for president to unseat the first black president? Hailing from Mississippi? With a record for misconstruing the enormous shame on the soul of the old South?
Sorry, he won’t get my primary vote if he decides to run. In fact, I already question his bearings and feel the need to set a few things straight because he has so blatantly muddied the Civil Rights movement waters.
Mr. Barbour was born in 1947, too late to be held accountable for continuing to uphold a post-Civil-War era code of laws. But I’m even younger, was born in 1951, and the Civil Rights era still amounts to far, far, more than “diddly” to me. I clearly remember the tales of my grandmother’s childhood on the family plantation in Mississippi, where black tenant farmers and their children lived lives completely reminiscent of their slave ancestors. I was in at least the third grade before it dawned on me that the War Between the States had happened nearly a century before I was born, and I could finally rest easily knowing that some guy named Sherman wasn’t actually down the road a piece burning everything in sight. Our parents and grandparents spoke of that war as though it were still going on or had happened the day before yesterday.
I played with the children of my grandmother’s “colored” maid and still remember my own young soul’s recoil over “separate but equal” schools. It took neither a genius nor a saint to fully understand a systematic wrong occurring every single day right under one’s nose.
Those “Citizens Councils,” to which Governor Barbour gave such mitigating virtue in his Weekly Standard interview, were in fact the upper class version of the Klan. No, the Citizens Councils did not resort to cross-burning, lynching, threats of lynching, or even public anger to keep life as it had always been in the South — segregated.
Instead, the Citizens Councils relied on the same type of financial and public-pressure machinations regularly now employed by Democrat race-hustlers and their NGO friends in the community-organizing outfits, like ACORN. The fact that racialists of a new variety have replaced the ones of old doesn’t change the nature of the beast at all or the immorality of their actions.
But if Haley Barbour thinks for even one minute that asserting the two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right mantra will save him from the consequences of his truly egregious comments on the race issue, then he needs a long vacation, not a presidential campaign.
That there is indisputably a double-standard on racial issues between Democrats and Republicans ought to be apparent to any ninny with a working set of eyes and ears. If a Republican had said of candidate Barack Obama that, of course, he was an appealing candidate as the first “articulate, clean-cut African-American” to run, that man would not now be vice president but would have been consigned to the farthest corner of social oblivion.
If a Republican had said that Barack Obama had the advantage of having no “negro dialect,” but that he could put one on any time he wanted to, that man would not still be on the White House guest list, even if he was the Senate majority leader.
If a Republican former president had said of candidate Obama that in former years he “would have been fetchin’ us coffee,” that man would not have been invited to take over a White House press conference but would never have been heard from again.
Haley Barbour may be a fine governor of Mississippi. He may be the best good ole boy lobbyist that the inside-beltway folks have ever heard spin a good yarn for his clients or constituents. And all of that may be just wonderful for the citizens of Mississippi, the Republican governors, and the whole Grand Old Party. But taking those assets onto center national stage in prime time, carrying the baggage of Jim Crow and an obviously muted understanding of its legacy in the minds and hearts of all who lived through it — both black and white alike — is a bridge beyond too far.
Only someone who habitually denies reality, in my humble opinion, could possibly think otherwise.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member