I think Dave Weigel is right about Republican voters and Haley Barbour:
Like I said, Barbour is not dumb. If he's being a revisionist about race in Mississippi, he's not alone, and he's fighting back against a media standard that all conservatives hate -- this idea that Southerners and conservatives can never stop atoning for Jim Crow. Why should he have to apologize for this, after all? He wasn't in a Citizens Council. With the exception of some people, like Howell Raines -- who covered Barbour's 1986 Senate bid -- how many of these reporters know what they're talking about, anyway? And there are few things conservative voters hate more than being told they were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement.
Just as some have tried to rationalize Jim Crow by arguing that the federal government's intervention on behalf of black rights was the true evil, conservatives think that the big problem with racism is that liberals won't stop talking about it. The real problem isn't that Barbour remembers the Mississippi of the 1960s as not being "that bad," and the white supremacist citizens' councils as constructive forces, it's that liberals won't stop trying to suffocate everyone with their political correctness and demands that minorities have all kinds of special rights.
