re: #240 Obdicut

The Barbour thing is just insane, as is the amount of defense he’s getting. It’s sickeningly shameful.

Oops:

politico.com

The context is a 1982 New York Times article on Barbour’s challenge that year to the octogenarian incumbent Democratic Senator, John Stennis. The piece’s tone is almost sneering about Barbour — ” Mr. Barbour, now 34 years old, won renown as a high school linebacker and as a dedicated attender of parties at the state university” — but this is the passage that he’ll get asked about on the campaign trail:

This being Mississippi, race is a factor in the campaign, but mainly because neither candidate has offered much to black voters. The Republicans have tried to remind them that in 1964 Mr. Stennis sponsored legislation to export Mississippi blacks to states that wanted to practice integration.

But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be ”coons” at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.