Saturday, August 01, 2009

OP ED: Barbour for President? Seriously

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Barbour for President? Seriously
by Matt Mackowiak
Congressional Quarterly
Friday, July 31, 2009

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has shown he knows how to maneuver his way through a bad storm. While leaders in neighboring Louisiana bickered about who loused up the recovery there from Hurricane Katrina, Barbour was taking bows for his work in Mississippi and cruising to re-election with a higher margin than four years earlier.

The former national Republican Party chairman is leading the Republican Governors Association, having stepped in to take the wheel after its former chairman, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina flamed out in a scandal that left his career and family in tatters.

Barbour takes over the RGA as 37 states prepare to hold gubernatorial elections next year. Thus, Barbour will be raising money and campaigning on behalf of many Republican candidates, increasing his national profile and getting himself up to date with key party officials, politicians and donors across the country.
In June he visited the pivotal primary states of New Hampshire and Iowa to help raise money for their state GOP organizations.

That combination of appearances is rarely a coincidence.

Barbour’s life is a study in the art of politics. He skipped the first semester of his senior year in college to volunteer on Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign. Barbour then served as the Mississippi State Director for the U.S. Census Bureau in 1969.

In 1982, he lost a challenger bid for the U.S. Senate. Three years later he was named White House political director for President Reagan and was elected Mississippi’s Republican national committeeman from 1984-1998.

Following the election of Bill Clinton, Barbour was elected Chairman of the RNC. During his four-year tenure, he helped defeat “Hillarycare” and helped launch the “Contract with America”, resulting in the historic 1994 midterm elections that brought Republicans into power in Congress.

Barbour has also had tremendous success in the private sector, launching one of the most successful lobbying firms in Washington, DC, which Fortune magazine has called one of the powerful lobbying firms in the country.

Barbour is a native of Yazoo City, MS (population 14,550) and he maintains a home on Wolf Lake there. In 2003 Barbour left Washington and returned home to run for governor. Barbour decided to take on incumbent Democrat Ronnie Musgrove, who first won election in 1999 by a margin of 8,300 votes, requiring the state legislature to select the winner. In his campaign, Barbour attacked Musgrove’s poor economic record and his opposition to tort reform. Musgrove attacked Barbour’s lobbying background on behalf of tobacco and pharmaceutical companies.

Aided by a $2 million fundraising advantage, Barbour defeated Musgrove 53 percent-46 percent, becoming the state’s second Republican governor since Reconstruction. He was reelected in 2007 with 58 percent of the vote.

He inherited a $720 million budget gap and balanced the budget without across-the-board tax increases, which he has continued to do with a legislature controlled by Democrats.

He has been particularly proud of a tort reform law, which he praised at a speech at a county fair in the summer of 2007: “In 2004, our legislature passed the most comprehensive tort reform law in the country, and it has worked. Toyota would not have located in Mississippi if we hadn’t passed tort reform. Four years ago Mississippi had lost more than 38,000 jobs. Our state had lost 22 percent of its manufacturing jobs during those four years — the worst in the nation. In this administration there has been a net increase of more than 41,000 jobs. Today more people are working in Mississippi than at any other time in our state’s history.”

Republican State Senator Charlie Ross said, “We’ve gone from being the center of jackpot justice to a state that now has model legislation.”
Barbour’s ultimate legacy will be his management of the state’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. More than one million people Mississippians were affected and 60 percent of the state was declared a federal disaster area. In Mississippi alone, the storm wreaked $125 billion in estimated damage, devastating the state’s $2.7 billion-a-year casino industry.

Where many politicians failed in their response to the Katrina devastation, Barbour excelled. In 2006, Governing magazine named Barbour Governor of the Year, saying he was a “strong leader who communicated calm to the public” while also serving as a “central decision-making point” when roadblocks slowed things down. Among the successes, the state provided temporary housing for more than 100,000 residents, helped thousands of businesses rebuild to erase a labor shortage and reopened all public schools within three months.

Billy Hewes III, a Republican state senator from the Gulf Coast, said, “He is to Katrina what Rudy Giuliani was to 9/11.”

As Barbour embarks on increased national travel and tests the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2012, many will question whether his southern roots and lobbying success will prohibit him from being a viable national candidate.

But his demonstrated success as an executive will give him a platform to run if he wants to. And his years spent in Washington counting votes, raising money, and helping candidates will give him an advantage.

If Barbour launches a presidential bid for 2012, he will have to counter the conventional wisdom by showing he can win outside the South and can do so by displaying strength in Iowa, New Hampshire, or another early primary state.

A household name he’s not, but someone to watch in 2012 he is.

Matt Mackowiak is the founder of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC and formerly was a Senate Press Secretary.