The Times editorialized today about Haley Barbour the Mississippi Governor, former leader of the Republican National Committee, wealthy corporate lobbyist, and Presidential aspirant. Barbour was the subject of a gauzy profile in the Weekly Standard . He spoke about the civil rights era - it was "not that bad", and lauded the white citizens council as a business men's group in his hometown that kept the Klan at bay (rather than as a central force in resistance to implementation of Brown v. Board of Education."
“`We were Eastland Democrats,” Haley told me, referring to James O. Eastland, the long-serving U.S. senator, steadfast conservative, committed segregationist'. " The Standard's reporter - blissfully unaware of the impact of what he had just reported, wrote
What role Yazoo City’s segregationist past might play in Barbour’s presidential campaign is hard to say. It could become an issue, particularly for Washington political reporters who enjoy moralizing about race and public education while sending their own children to progressive schools like Sidwell Friends and St. Albans, where applicants of color are discreetly screened and their numbers carefully regulated.
The Times responded strongly: Barbour's segregationist past will be an issue:
In Gov. Haley Barbour’s hazy, dream-coated South, the civil-rights era was an easy transition for his Mississippi hometown of Yazoo City. As he told the Weekly Standard recently, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an unmemorable speaker, and notorious White Citizens Councils protected the world from violent racists.
Perhaps Mr. Barbour, one of the most powerful men in the Republican Party and a potential presidential candidate, suffers from the faulty memory all too common among those who stood on the sidelines during one of the greatest social upheavals in history. It is more likely, though, that his recent remarks on the period fit a well-established pattern of racial insensitivity that raises increasing doubts about his fitness for national office.
Gov. Barbour’s Dream World - NYTimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment