Charles Barkley To Run For Alabama Governor in 2014

NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley said he’s going to run for governor in Alabama.

“I plan on it in 2014,” Barkley told CNN’s Campbell Brown on Monday.

When asked if he was serious, the former Philadelphia 76er said, “I am, I can’t screw up Alabama.”

He added that his native state could only improve. “We are number 48 in everything and Arkansas and Mississippi aren’t going anywhere,” Barkley said.

He said that his top priority as governor would be education. “The public school system in this country is the worst it has ever been and what that does is that hurts crime, it hurts the judicial system,” he said. “You know if you don’t give people education and hope, they become criminals. They get involved in drugs. So we have got to fix the public school system.”

Barkley, who had once considered running for governor as a Republican in the 1990s but is now supporting Barack Obama for president, had choice words for his former party.

“Listen, John McCain, you gotta respect anybody who goes to war. But these Republicans who ran this economy into the ground,” he said. “We’ve got to end the war in Iraq and we got to stop giving rich people like myself and people who run big companies tax breaks. We’ve got to do that.”

He accused Republicans of using race as an issue in this year’s campaign by talking about terrorists and Muslims.

“We’ve had eight terrible years under the Bush’s administration, with the war in Iraq,” he said. “I’ve said it from the beginning. The only way they can win this election is make it about race. That’s the only way they can win.”