Why Haley Barbour Will Never Be President

In reality I have no idea whether or not Haley Barbour is a racist, or whether he is a "revisionist," as in someone who engages in re-writing history for hobby or political gain. What I do think, is that Gov. Barbour is not particularly interested in engaging with, or understanding people who are different than he is. He has little or no desire to genuinely hear the story of "the other," and probably little capability to take the words of folks who have lived a different history than his own, as any form of truth. In today's post-modern word, that means you don't get elected President.

By all accounts, Barbour is an accomplished sort. He currently serves as Governor of Mississippi, and was a high-profile figure during his tenure as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. A real fixture on CNN. He is also presently the Chairman of the Republican Governors Association. And conventional wisdom has it that he is running for the Republican nomination for President in 2012.

Much has been made of Andrew Ferguson's lengthy profile of Gov. Barbour just published in The Weekly Standard. Take a read -- as is true in most cases, it is worth reading the source document before taking in all the commentary. The most attention has gone to his comments about the Citizens' Council of America, founded in 1954 as the White Citizens' Council. A white supremacist group known for its opposition to racial integration, in its heyday if had approximately 60,000 members, mostly in the South.

Gov. Barbour seems to think that the business community in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi was against the KKK because it was bad for the bottom line. From the Weekly Standard:

Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

I will leave it to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, and Matt Yglesias (among many, many others) to show us that the Citizens' Council was -- surprise, surprise -- NOT the benevolent association Barbour makes it out to be. Truly remarkable words, on the part of the good governor. It really makes me believe he has no ability to internalize the narrative of someone who has lived a different existence than he has. No desire to challenge his own assumptions based on what someone else says is his or her own truth. No interest in simply listening to someone else, and perhaps saying, "Really? Tell me more..." Or "let's talk, so I can understand how you remember it."

While so much has been made of Barbour's comments about the Citizens' Council, far more shocking are his comments about growing up in the civil rights era. The picture painted here of sheer disinterest, is remarkable.

In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

Did you go? I asked.

“Sure, I was there with some of my friends.”

I asked him why he went out.

“We wanted to hear him speak.” 

I asked what King had said that day.

“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”

If these words truly represent Gov. Barbour's sentiments, he has clearly either never spoken a word to a middle-aged, African-American man from Mississippi, or he has and then completely dismissed the words as bearing no personal or historic truth. He does not even seem to have the political savvy to know he should have re-told the story -- yes, lied to make himself look more attractive. Or better yet, told the truth, but perhaps with some lament about how he felt about the experience at the time.

That said, it did not take long for Barbour to release a statement of retraction related to his published words. It is short and sweet, and odd in its inability to show he has any understanding for the complexities of the issues raised by the history of his Mississippi hometown. Segregation, indefensible? African-Americans, persecuted? A difficult era? Somehow I can't shower praise on the simplicity of them-there-fighting-words:

"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.

Clearly, Gov. Barbour can't look back at the young man he was and position himself as a more introspective citizen of the present-day. He is either not interested in anyone other than himself and doesn't know he should be, or simply can't pretend to care. That is why he will never be President