State’s racial past could hurt a presidential bid by Haley Barbour

As a two-term governor, he shepherded his state through one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. As a lobbyist, he mastered Washington’s inside power game. As a GOP strategist, he orchestrated era-defining national victories for the Republican Party.

But as Haley Barbour positions himself for a potential presidential run, he is having a hard time shaking the ghosts of his native Mississippi.

Twice in recent months, Barbour, 63, has sparked criticism and national debate after addressing issues at the heart of his state’s troubled racial past. In a December profile in the Weekly Standard, he praised the Citizens’ Councils of the civil rights era — the segregationist groups that ran towns like his — though he later reversed himself and called the councils “indefensible.”

Last week, with Mississippi gearing up to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Barbour spurred more controversy when he declined to denounce an effort to create a state license plate honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate lieutenant general and early Ku Klux Klan leader. “I don’t go around denouncing people,” Barbour said at a news conference.

On Monday, while touring Iowa with Republican activists, Barbour told the Associated Press he would not sign such a bill if it came to him. Though he denounced the Klan, he said, it was his policy not to denounce individuals, living or dead.

Still, the risk for the term-limited governor — who says he is “very serious” about a possible presidential run — is that race issues will come to overshadow his accomplishments.

J. David Woodard, a Republican consultant and political science professor at Clemson University, said he was surprised that Barbour hadn’t better prepared for the inevitable questions about race.

“You’d think that somebody who came from Mississippi would have thought, ‘This is the biggest obstacle I’d have to overcome,’ ” Woodard said. He added that it also seems unfair that so much attention has focused on Barbour and race.

“He’s got a record a mile long,” Woodard said. “But this gets brought up to him and somehow or another he can’t get away from it.”

When asked whether the recent incidents were harmful to Barbour, Democratic consultant Mark Mellman laughed and, in an apparent reference to the GOP’s relative lack of black support, quipped: “Not in the Republican primary.”

Mellman, who has known Barbour for years, said he couldn’t speculate about whether Barbour’s recent comments were calculated as dog whistles to unreconstructed whites. Whether intentional or not, Mellman said, the comments sent “some signal” to “a segment of the Republican primary electorate that is still not committed to racial tolerance and racial equality.”

As a Southerner and governor of his state, Barbour already could count on a struggle to get to the White House. Mississippi — with its history of slavery and poverty, apartheid and atrocity — holds a special place in the American repository of myth and stereotype. The state has never produced an American president.

The presidency “was going to be a mountain to climb under the best of circumstances,” said Marty Wiseman, director of the Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University. With his recent race comments, Wiseman said, Barbour “added another 10,000 feet to that mountain.”

Barbour is a native of Yazoo City, at the edge of the Mississippi Delta. With a deep, booming drawl and a fondness for rural colloquialisms — his favored mantra after Hurricane Katrina was that Mississippians “hitched up their britches” and rebuilt without complaint — he’s never been accused of failing to embrace his roots.

He was a son of the local white elite who attended public schools before desegregation. In the Weekly Standard article, he said he didn’t remember the civil rights era as “being that bad.”

Barbour is recognized, even by opponents, as a gifted politician who combines an amiable front-porch demeanor with ample strategic and fundraising prowess. Those traits were evident in 1994 when, with Barbour as chairman of the Republican National Committee, the GOP swept both houses of Congress, and in 2010, when Barbour served as head of the Republican Governors Assn. while the party saw a net gain of five governorships.

Less settled is the question of his legacy regarding black Mississippians. Opinions on the matter often fall along stark partisan lines.

Conservatives such as Forest Thigpen, president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, say that Barbour has served all Mississippians well by exhibiting the state’s can-do spirit after Hurricane Katrina, and bringing in foreign businesses including Toyota, which will begin building its Corolla model in Blue Springs in the fall.

But U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, slammed Barbour in an interview this week, saying that he had put “very few minorities” in his Cabinet in a state that is 37% black — the highest proportion among the 50 states. Thompson also said Barbour’s conservative policies did little to help people of color in a state beset with intractable difficulties.

“Do we still die more than anybody else in the state?” asked Thompson, who is black. “Are we sicker than anybody else in the state? … He has not made [such issues] a priority of his administration, and therefore there’s no identification in the African American community of Haley Barbour doing anything positive for them.”

Barbour defended his record in a recent Fox News appearance, saying he has increased minority business contracts and has had “outstanding” black administration members. Barbour did not say how many blacks he has hired, and his office would not return queries for this story. But one top state official who requested anonymity, because of the politically sensitive nature of the issue, said that two of the dozen or so departments over which Barbour has appointment authority are currently headed by African Americans. Barbour has also been criticized for failing to name a black to a judicial post until 2009.

In the past, Barbour has been outspoken in his support for the civil rights movement. In 2004, months after taking office, he gave a speech in Neshoba County on the 40th anniversary of the lynching of three civil rights workers there.

“Today it is appropriate to remember this horrid evil 40 years past, and it is also appropriate to recognize and praise God for all the progress that has occurred since then, especially in Mississippi,” he said.

In his most recent State of the State address, a few weeks after the Weekly Standard article was published, Barbour reiterated his call for the creation of a civil rights museum in Jackson. He also recently announced that the state would “officially commemorate” the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides this spring.

Wiseman, the Mississippi State professor, said he’d never seen Barbour do anything “overtly racist.” What he has done, Wiseman said, is try to stay “benignly in the middle” on issues like the Confederate battle flag — which is controversially incorporated into the design of the official state flag — so as not to alienate blacks or white conservatives.

Some Republican consultants don’t believe the race issue would hurt Barbour in the primaries. But Mark McKinnon, a former advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain, said the story could be different in a general election.

“The problem is not so much the specifics, but rather the general perception that may be imbedded, which is that Barbour is old, backwards-thinking and part of the past,” McKinnon wrote in an e-mail. “Not exactly the best image to beat a young, progressive black president.”

richard.fausset@latimes.com