Could Haley Barbour's comments on race doom his potential 2012 GOP presidential run before it even starts?
On Tuesday, the Mississippi governor sought to clarify his remarks to the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson about growing up at the height of the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
"I just don't remember it as being that bad," Barbour had told Ferguson, noting that his hometown, Yazoo City, Miss., wasn't at the flash point of racial tensions at the time.
The governor went on to credit the Citizens Council, a group that has been viewed as pro-segregationist, for helping to integrate his hometown more peacefully than other cities in the Deep South were integrated.
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After a public outcry, Barbour clarified his remarks Tuesday, insisting he wasn't endorsing the group's views generally. "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," Barbour said in a statement. "Their vehicle, called the 'Citizens Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation."
But that's not likely to quiet Barbour's critics. On Monday, Democrats seized on the governor's comments, as well as his recollection of attending a Martin Luther King Jr. rally when he was a teenager. Barbour admitted that he spent more time "watching the girls" than listening to the civil rights icon.
"He's not ready for prime time or not ready for the 21st century - either way it's disqualifying," Democratic National Committee spokesman Hari Sevugan said in a message on Twitter.
To make matters worse, Politico's Ben Smith dug up a quote from a Barbour profile in the New York Times from 1982 in which Barbour warned an aide about making racist remarks with a questionable statement of his own. According to the Times, Barbour "warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."
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In an item Tuesday, the National Review's Jim Geraghty argues that Barbour's remarks to the Weekly Standard might not by themselves make him "unelectable" but that a pattern of insensitive comments along with the idea that he was "oblivious" to the suffering of others might.
"A pattern of remarks is a different matter than one off-the-cuff anecdote that suggests a man remembers the elders of his youth through rose-colored glasses," Geraghty writes. "Watermelon jokes are appalling. Perhaps in that time and place the comment was common, but to modern ears, across the country today, it's an unthinkably obnoxious and racially provocative remark."
(Photo of Barbour: Rogelio V. Solis/AP)
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