Politics: Haley Barbour’s not feeling the love over civil rights comments
- There’s nothing in his past that shows that. If you pick out a sentence or a paragraph out of a fairly long article and harp on it, you can manipulate it.
- Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s press secretary, Dan Turner • Criticizing the coverage of comments Barbour made to The Weekly Standard about living during the Civil Rights era. Liberal organization Media Matters, which obviously would want to make political hay out of something like this, promoted the comments, in which Barbour praised the White Citizens’ Councils (a late-’60s group that opposed integration of different races) as “an organization of town leaders” that were a positive force in the community. As for the civil rights struggle in his hometown, Yazoo City, Mississippi, he simply said: “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.” Barbour, who’s been suggested as a presidential candidate more than once, has been one of the party’s most successful figures in recent years, so if something like this stuck, it could hurt his chances. source