Mississippi pardons may be hard to forgive
Share with others:
It was only last year that former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour was considered a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He was widely touted as one of the smoothest operators in the GOP and a tactician without peer.
The very popular two-term governor had a homespun charm and a keen intelligence that would've come in handy in debates against President Obama. He seriously mulled a presidential run but ultimately nixed the idea because his past was too intertwined with Mississippi's tortured racial history. He harbors too much light-hearted nostalgia for Jim Crow oppression to be a viable presidential candidate outside of Dixie.
Had he thrown his hat in the ring, Mr. Barbour would have been forced to explain some of his odder notions. He once credited the notorious White Citizens' Councils that operated in the South in the 1950s and 1960s with keeping his Mississippi town free of Klan activity during the height of the civil rights era -- a preposterous idea of accomplishment.
Yet, as his final days in office ticked down, Mr. Barbour was still among the most viable vice presidential candidates in his party. He had the kind of gravitas and rotund charisma that could potentially make a silly goose like Willard "Mitt" Romney look good. Alas, that was 215 pardons ago.
Last week, Mr. Barbour exhausted every ounce of conservative goodwill he had earned over two terms by pardoning a record number of convicted Mississippians of crimes ranging from theft to murder. It's the wiping away of five murder convictions, most of them quite sensational, that stood out for outraged Mississippians.
When I first heard about the pardons, I was amazed by the seeming magnanimity of an act that would disqualify one of the most talented politicians of this era from ever running for political office on the Republican side of the ledger.
That's not to say there would be much room for Mr. Barbour on the Democratic side either, in the unlikely event he ever contemplated doing an Arlen Specter. Jim Hood, Mississippi's ambitious attorney general and the state's highest-ranking Democrat, excoriated Mr. Barbour harder than anyone. Although Mr. Hood's over-the-top opportunism will find a place of honor in the demagoguing hall of fame, the contempt poured on Mr. Barbour has been bipartisan.
Even so, it is difficult to make sense of Mr. Barbour's gesture of amazing grace, given his state's political realities when it comes to issues of crime and punishment. We live in a country where the issue is so perilous that President Obama himself lacks the political will to pardon criminals. Mr. Obama even appears to approach the ritual sparing of the Thanksgiving turkey with the same mix of caution and calculation he reserves for other issues.
And let's face it, Mississippians have never been the kind of folks who turn the other cheek. Justice, when it wasn't purely whimsical or color-coded, has always been spotty that far south of the Mason-Dixon. Mississippi's prisons are bulging because the deep South is a place that has elevated Old Testament law and vengeance over any sense of New Testament redemption.
The fact is that most of the criminals for whom Mr. Barbour restored voting, hunting and gun-owning rights have been free for years. He merely expunged their records and made it possible for them to make a living without being stigmatized as felons for the rest of their lives.
The murderers the former governor spared were model prisoners who worked in the governor's mansion as butlers, cooks, groundskeepers and chauffeurs. Sure, it's a bit too antebellum for my taste, but these are men to whom Mr. Barbour once entrusted the safety of his family.
"I understand, recognize and respect the fact that if you were injured by somebody, or if your loved one was killed, that there may be vengeance, there may be fear, there may be all of these things," Mr. Barbour said during a televised interview this week.
"A lot of guys aren't going to be rehabilitated," he said. "These [men and women] have been. They've redeemed themselves. They deserve a second chance."
Are we a country that believes in redemption? Good question. Had these been 215 racist skinheads, would I tolerate any talk of redemption? The truth is that I don't know how much benefit of the doubt I would give Mr. Barbour if I lived in Mississippi.
First Published January 20, 2012 12:00 am
