Teaparty shows Evidence Barbour at Center of Race-Baiting in MS
A new white paper from Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund puts a target on GOP operative Henry Barbour for his role in incendiary racial appeals in the Mississippi GOP Senate primary.
“Henry Barbour was the field general in an unprecedented campaign to smear a fellow Republican, so desperate was his family to cling to power,” Jenny Beth Martin, the chair of TPPCF, said in the statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News. “We’re used to these tactics from Democrats: desperate appeals to emotion, fear-mongering, even playing the ‘Klan’ card. Who would have thought the Barbour machine would finance such despicable race-baiting?”
During the campaign, a Super PAC run by Barbour, Mississippi Conservatives, provided funds to Democratic operatives and organizations that put out literature and ran radio ads that said voting incumbent Sen. Cochran was a means of stopping the Tea Party and preventing his primary challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, from “ roll[ing] back the hand of time,” among other examples.
According to National Review, Barbour, the nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, vehemently denied having any role in the ads to Republican colleagues before finally admitting to it in an interview with reporter Eliana Johnson, saying colorful remarks McDaniel made on talk radio a decade ago and efforts to prevent voter fraud invited the scrutiny from black Democrats.
“Many Mississippians, who were already disgusted by McDaniel’s race-baiting talk-radio-show comments, heard the code words that insinuated that African Americans were not welcome in the Republican primary,” Barbour told National Review.
Monday, however, a Democratic activist said she had funded one particularly vicious ad that raised the specter of the KKK, and Barbour was quoted saying “I