Sid Salter recently wrote a column explaining why he thinks Haley Barbour’s probable bid for the Republican presidential nomination is, “no longer so far-fetched.”  

    Salter mentions Barbour’s accent and weight as drawbacks to his presidential aspirations, but skims over the real reasons that Barbour has so far made both a poor presidential candidate and a poor representative of the state of Mississippi.

    Salter opens his column by asking, “Can a Mississippian win a major American political party’s nomination?”

    I don’t think that’s the right question.

    Haley Barbour’s presidential bid isn’t far-fetched because he’s a Mississippian or, as Salter implies, because he has an accent. It’s far-fetched because he’s Haley Barbour. He comes off to most non-Mississippians as a good ole boy and a Washington insider at the same time, and his recent string of gaffes makes the presidential race look further out of his league with every snarky national headline.

    The accent is certainly not the issue. There have been presidents with Southern accents before, but they’ve used those accents to their advantage. Because they knew how to say the right things, their accents made them more relatable and kept them from being labeled as elitist.

    With his Southern accent Bill Clinton said to America, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right in America.” Jimmy Carter said, “Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.”

    But what does Haley Barbour tell the world with his Southern accent: “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think that was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.” 

    It’s not the fact that Barbour is from Mississippi or has an accent that makes him look like an idiot, it’s what he says with his accent. Haley Barbour is not in general a stupid person, but he makes it hard for anyone outside of Mississippi to tell.

    Barbour’s favorable remark about the Citizens Councils, white supremacist organizations who only opposed the Klan because they didn’t want the competition, is but one of his racial gaffes. He also refused to denounce a proposed Mississippi license plate honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a famous former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan.

    His reaction to the criticism: “I don’t go around denouncing people.”

    Really? Because I’ve noticed that there’s usually a lot of denouncing going on in presidential campaigns. I’m sure the other GOP hopefuls won’t hesitate to denounce Haley Barbour as they fight and scratch their way through the primaries.

    Adding to Barbour’s questionable record on race, he is currently being sued by the NAACP, which has accused him of attempting to gerrymander the black (i.e. Democratic) vote out of state legislative districts. And as if all that wasn’t enough, he’s also garnered the attention of a national media outlet, time.com, for the amount of taxpayer money he’s spent flying in a private jet.

    As Politico pointed out when Barbour Press Secretary Dan Turner resigned after publicly making jokes at the expense of Japanese Tsunami victims, “(Turner’s) off-color jokes…underscore questions about whether the governor is ready for the intensity of scrutiny that will come with leaving the relatively forgiving world of Mississippi politics.”

    It’s true that Turner is no longer Barbour’s press secretary, but the damage has already been done. Turner’s off-color jokes are now permanently associated with Barbour, and Barbour’s opponents won’t forget that the person he hired specifically to make him look good made him look bad instead.

    When the primary campaign begins to really boil, it won’t be Barbour’s accent, weight, or Mississippi address that cost him the most – It will be his issues with race, his history as a Washington lobbyist, and his tendency to speak before he thinks that will give his competitors plenty of angles from which to attack.

    The other campaigns won’t be saying that Barbour will make a bad president because he’s from Mississippi and has an accent. They’ll be saying that he’s a big tobacco lobbyist who owes a debt to special interests, a waster of state money who will probably waste federal money too, and a racist who has made his state look bad and will make his country look even worse.

    I’m not saying that Haley Barbour is a bad governor. I think he’s done some good things and some bad, like most politicians. I’m not saying he’s a racist, because I don’t know if he is or not. I’m not even saying that he has no chance of getting the GOP nomination. Anything’s possible.

    What I am saying is that, in the national political arena, it won’t matter if Haley Barbour is actually an idiot, a racist, or a money waster; all that will matter is that he looks like he is. He has lots of political baggage which makes him a far cry from the shoe-in Salter seems to think he is.

    To outsiders, Haley Barbour looks about as much like presidential material as the character in, “Oh, Brother Where Art Thou,” who proclaimed his allegiance to the KKK at a political rally and then asked the crowd as they turned on him, “Is you is or is you ain’t my constituents?” That is just the type of negative stereotype of Mississippians that Barbour seems bent on reinforcing.

    The nauseatingly blind praise of Mississippi journalists like Sid Salter doesn’t help to debunk those stereotypes, and it’s certainly not likely to help Haley Barbour in Iowa, New Hampshire, or even in his home state.

    Jennifer Jacob Brown is a reporter with The Meridian Star. Email her at

jbrown@themeridianstar.com