I think this screenshot taken by Steve M. pretty much says it all:
Like I wrote yesterday, for conservatives the issue isn't that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has rose-colored memories of Jim Crow, it's that liberals keep trying to force their politically correct worldview on everyone else. Many conservatives think white people being accused of racism is more of a problem than actual racism.
I don't know that Barbour's nostalgia and general indifference to the plight of black folks in the South makes him unusual. Most Americans in the South, white and black, were neither heroes nor villains of the civil rights movement. Most Americans period, did not protest or actively try to enforce Jim Crow. Most Americans were bystanders and spectators to American apartheid and the subsequent changes spurred by the civil rights movement.
From what we know about Barbour, he was a mere bystander. What's appalling isn't that he did not tear down the institution of Jim Crow with his bare hands, it's that in order to defend being a bystander, he suggests that nothing was happening around him that was worth objecting to. That, like his odd indifference to a fellow student at Ole Miss who was living in a Hell Barbour recalls as a "a very pleasant experience," does not vouch well for his character, but I'd argue that both tell us something about how differently race is lived in America.