Barbour
officially walks back his comments:
When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns' integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn't tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the 'Citizens Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.
Of course, if he'd given an honest answer to the question actually asked from the beginning, there'd be no need for walkback.
Jim Geraghty
over at the National Review has an alternatingly condemning and sympathetic take on Barbour's racial image problems, which may be worth examining as a representative mainstream-conservative reaction:
...Presuming the anecdote of Barbour’s watermelon joke is accurate, it will outweigh everything else he’s done in the eyes of millions upon millions of voters. [The reference is to a 1982 Senate campaign incident where Barbour, embarrassed by his aide's grumbling about "coons" within an NYT reporter's earshot, teasingly chided the aide that he'd be "reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks." ~y.] There’s too much baggage to that remark to dismiss as a momentary stupid slip of the tongue. Even if a racially insensitive remark is said to rebuke another’s racially insensitive remark, with enough examples, the benefit of the doubt is eviscerated.
I stand by my earlier point that the bar for accusations of racism has gotten dangerously low, and that Monday afternoon we saw a disturbing conveyor belt in which Barbour was compared to the worst villains of American history over a lone comment that suggests historical inaccuracy and gauzy hometown sentimentalism, not a deep-rooted hatred or a belief in one group of Americans’ inferiority. Neither inaccuracy nor obliviousness is hate, and neither deserves the same response.
...Couple this with other Barbour comments:
•Barbour fondly remembering a black classmate at the University of Mississippi in 1965 and recalling his time there as “a very pleasant experience.” The classmate, Verna Bailey, recalls the time quite differently: “I don’t remember him at all, no, because during that time that certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience for me,” she said. “My interactions with white people were very, very limited. Very, very few reached out at all.”
•His comment that the controversy about commemorating Confederate History Month in Virginia “doesn’t amount to diddly.”
•His statement that he attended “integrated” schools—he attended during the 50s and early 60s—when Mississippi schools were not effectively integrated until 1970.
You can see a pattern emerging: where others in Mississippi experienced a painful, frightening, scarring struggle to recognize and assure the rights guaranteed all Americans, Barbour experienced a pleasant upbringing and was largely unaware of and unaffected by Civil Rights era conflicts as a child and a young man. It is possible to put this together and make a legitimate argument against Barbour: He is governor of a state that played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement, and yet today sees a long, difficult, sometimes violent, struggle for equal rights as all too easy and driven by consensus. Having seemed oblivious to the hardship and pain of Americans who were denied their God-given rights in the past, a voter might wonder if he would, as president, be properly vigilant against modern examples of Americans unjustly denied their rights.
Of course, Barbour critics skipped all that; his comment was seized upon as ipso facto evidence of racism, and it was open season to denounce him as a racist. Mississippi was denounced as “the state where politicians actually run ON racism.” The Washington Monthly declared he was “well positioned to wrap up the racist vote.” Wonkette declares he “wants a piece of that 2012 Segregationist Money” and the American Prospect call him “The Good King of White Supremacy.” The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson calls him “beyond appalling.” (Really? “Appalling” is too kind an adjective for him?)
...
Does Barbour’s kind interpretation of the Citizens Council make him unelectable? Alone, perhaps not, but coupled with the watermelon joke and other factors, almost certainly, and deservedly so if Barbour had a habit of using stereotypical caricatures. But if Barbour’s future career is derailed by these comments, it will further reflect the epic double standard reflecting race and partisan politics. Harry Reid can marvel at Barack Obama’s lack of a “Negro accent” with no real consequence. Bill Clinton can describe Obama to Ted Kennedy as a “guy [who] would have been getting us coffee” not long ago with no real consequence. Hillary Clinton faced accusations of racism for appearing to diminish the accomplishments of Martin Luther King in comparison to Lyndon Johnson--until the Democratic primary ended, and then no liberal had much reason to stir the controversy further. Joe Biden can utter awful stereotypical jokes about Indians running 7-11s and Dunkin’ Doughnuts with no major repercussion. The President’s mentor trafficked in explicit racial insults--referring to Italians as “garlic noses”--and the topic was deemed irrelevant by many. And of course, there is the former recruiter of the Ku Klux Klan who used the n-word on national television with little major repercussion.
I'd add to Barbour's racial track record his refusal to publically dissociate himself from the endorsements of the
Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor organization to the Citizens' Councils, which remains openly segregationist (he said he "didn't care" who endorsed him and that to think otherwise was "a slippery slope").
I find it naive on Geraghty's part to think that "historical inaccuracy and gauzy hometown sentimentalism" suffice to explain Barbour's comments. No doubt those are mixed in there somewhere, but some things simply aren't morally worthy subjects for nostalgia, and as his own 'clarification' acknowledges, Barbour knows perfectly well what the Citizens' Councils' true mission was, even if he
might be fuzzy on the specifics of how his own city's Council pursued it. To whitewash the past like this is to defiantly refuse to own your involvement in it. Which may lead in turn to dismissive views that, say, blacks' protest at their own governor's participation in honoring their ancestors' enslavers "doesn't amount to diddly." Which may lead in turn to an intentionally deaf ear to the concerns of black constituents, and perhaps others you associate with them as well. You hardly need be a rabid, vitriolic ideologue to be susceptible to this process--if anything, a signature part of Barbour's good-ol'-boy style is to respond with paternalistic, 'friendly,' 'jokey' condescension rather than open confrontationality when challenged with others' indignation, righteous or otherwise. He's a smart man, he gets that times have changed, but he grew up with certain assumptions about what people's proper relationships to each other in society ought to look and feel like, and he doesn't seem to have fully reckoned with the implications of desegregation for his political instincts.
I do get where Geraghty's coming from about the unconstructiveness and sometimes hypocrisy of "ipso facto" denunciations. It's snickerworthy when liberal pundits dub Barbour "Boss Hogg," but it's also juvenile, and symptomatic of a lazy attitude that we don't need to bother understanding exactly what kind of political animal Barbour is and where he comes from. That said, past a certain point (I'm thinking the 'watermelon joke,' perhaps) it does seem a bit precious to look down on people for having hair-trigger reactions--Barbour was 35 when he said that, running for national office, and speaking with a national newspaper.
Geraghty's analogies to various Democrats seem pretty weak to me. The Clinton ones don't really even make sense--Bill Clinton's aggressive "support" for Hillary on the trail clearly
was highly damaging to her campaign, her own slip-up didn't help, and since we're talking the impact on Barbour's
Presidential aspirations here, what sense does it make to gripe that these comments were "forgotten" after Hillary's Presidential aspirations failed? Robert Byrd apologized for, not just 'clarified,' his weird and uncomfortable reference to "white n-----s" (rednecks) afterwards, just as he'd repeatedly acknowledged and repudiated his own past loyalties previously, with a humble directness it's almost impossible to imagine coming from Barbour. Wright wasn't Obama's "mentor" (9 times out of 10, when a pundit refers to some candidate's "mentor" that means a lazy, irresponsible smear is forthcoming), nor was he running for office, and anyhow his racial comments did indeed create a major campaign crisis for Obama--albeit not the particular comment Geraghty bizarrely singles out, which involved Wright's take on the Roman Empire in ancient Israel, not present-day Italian-Americans, though I
guess you could kinda sorta parley it into some 'coded' expression of prejudice towards them. Reid had no prior history of racist comments nor affiliation with racist groups, as Barbour does, and like Byrd he apologized profusely for his comments. Biden did get more of a pass than he should've for his comments about Indian-Americans, no argument there, but to suggest that this is the sort of thing most Americans of either party would ever see as a dealbreaker--rather than Biden's tone-deaf idea of complimenting a new immigrant group's entrepreneurialism--is just silly.
Barbour does in some respects represent the end of an era, probably the last white Southerner raised with segregation to still(?) have a long shot at the White House, and as such he'll probably also be the last to encounter a certain guilty-until-proven-innocent (on race) skepticism from the media. But that skepticism isn't fundamentally unwarranted, even setting aside the uglies that are already there in Barbour's record; as a group, white Southerners of his generation had an obvious stake in resisting desegregation, and were raised and socialized to protect that stake. It may be uncomfortable, but it
is in the public interest to examine such men's backgrounds rigorously before entrusting them with the highest office our country has to offer, one where they would be working with a diverse legislature on addressing the interests of all Americans. Of course, this should happen at the state level as well, but unfortunately, that's not always how it works.