Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has been in the news recently for sticking his foot in his mouth but he’s always mentioned as a “presidential contender.” Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a rant about Haley Barbour and the idea that he was ever going to be a presidential contender:
Let’s state it flat out. You have to be deeply, securely, and no doubt permanently encased in the DC cocoon ever to have thought that Haley Barbour was a serious presidential candidate. Really, people. Any number of things would have to change to make Barbour a remotely credible presidential candidate — starting with erasing the image of Boss Hogg from the cultural memory of every American over the age of 30. And that would probably be one of the easier tasks on the list.
On first blush you might say, how is the Governor of Mississippi a creation of the DC cocoon? But the governor gig is just a recent flourish. Barbour made his career — and a very impressive one on its own terms — as an establishment Republican political operative and high-powered DC lobbyist. He co-founded one of the most powerful lobbying firms in the city — now BGR Group, formerly Barbour Griffith & Rogers. And he’s brought that high-flying lifestyle — sometimes literally — to the governor’s mansion in Mississippi, one of the poorest state’s in the union. Every elite journalist in DC knows Barbour — many of them socially and over a long period of time because as you can see from his demeanor glad-handing is a big part of the guy’s charm. And the same applies to pretty much everyone else from the city’s power grid.
Here’s a picture of Haley Barbour:
Here’s Boss Hogg:
Any resemblance? He not only looks like Boss Hogg, he sounds like him, too. Here he is with Chris Matthews saying Sarah Palin is qualified to be president:
Marshall continues:
Nor is it simply a matter of unhelpful idiom. A lot of pundits are saying that if Barbour wants to run for president he’ll need to be careful about how breezily he talks about race. But that’s like saying that someone with pneumonia needs to focus more on breathing. Maybe so, but it’s superficial advice. You don’t stumble into comments like that on the White Citizens Council movement by accident. The backbone of the modern Republican party is the white South and the areas of the midwest that are culturally part of the South — central Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, West Virginia, etc. They used to be Democrats; now they’re Republican. Barbour was joined at the hip to the people who ushered them out of the old party and into the new. Barbour is conservative Mississippian who grew up during the Civil Rights Era. This recent flap confirmed that he’s still very much of that time. To think someone like that would ever be a plausible presidential candidate in 2012 always required an extraordinary level of willful blindness.
I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. It almost makes me feel a little sorry though that we won’t have Haley Barbour to beat up on in the primaries. Oh well, I guess there’s still Multiple Choice Mitt and Sarah Palin and the rest of the clown car.