Early Political Career
Barbour soon became a Republican political operative and moved up the ranks of Republican organizing quickly, running Gerald Ford's 1976 campaign in the Southeast and working on the campaign of John Connally for president in 1980. In 1982 Barbour was the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate election in Mississippi, but was defeated by longtime incumbent John C. Stennis, a conservative Democrat, 64% to 36%, despite an endorsement by President Ronald Reagan. During the campaign, the New York Times reported that a Barbour aide complained about "coons" at a campaign event. Barbour, embarrassed that the comment was overheard by a reporter, told the aide that he would be "reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks" if he continued making racist comments.
Barbour later served as a political aide in the Reagan Administration and worked on the 1988 Presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush.
Read more about this topic: Haley Barbour
Famous quotes containing the words early, political and/or career:
“I could be, I discovered, by turns stern, loving, wise, silly, youthful, aged, racial, universal, indulgent, strict, with a remarkably easy and often cunning detachment ... various ways that an adult, spurred by guilt, by annoyance, by condescension, by loneliness, deals with the prerogatives of power and love.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)