Barbour ran for the Senate way back in 1982, which featured one of the widest disparities in age between incumbent and challenger (even more so than McDaniel-Cochran). This time as the GOP challenger to a still-sharp John Stennis, then 81, Stennis told the people of Mississippi not to send a boy (Barbour, who just turned 35 about 2 weeks before the election) to do a man’s job. It would be 21 years before Barbour recovered from that humiliation to run for office again there.
Shades of “You’re no Jack Kennedy”, I would have went hard negative on Stennis’ decrepit old posterior.
John Stennis.....Democrat or not was more a man than our GOP clowns