Veepstakes Gong Show: Haley Barbour

The Veepstakes Gong Show profiles spectacularly bad running-mate suggestions.

In Volume 4, we turn to Haley Barbour, former Washington superlobbyist, ex-chair of the Republican National Committee, and current two-term governor of Mississippi.

Whose hare-brained idea was this? Pretty much everybody's. National Review readers, for one; Lisa Schiffren, who's been collecting Veepstakes suggestions at NR, says Barbour is the suggestion she sees third most often, after Bobby Jindal and Tim Pawlenty. Marc Ambinder's readers are also pushing the idea. Fittingly for a superlobbyist, there is even a Draft Haley for Vice President PAC, which is currently seeking your donations to put this TV spot on the air:



Why might a sentient person, at first, think this idea makes sense? Barbour is a twice-elected governor of a southern state, and he's been widely praised for his administration's effective response to Hurricane Katrina. Also, Schiffren suggests that he's "immensely charming" and "very smart"-- valuable traits in any superlobbyist or vice-presidential candidate. (Actually, in one of the more dubious turns of praise I have seen in a while, Schiffren describes Barbour as follows: "Imagine if Trent Lott had been really smart.")

So why does this idea suck? Did we mention that Barbour's primary career was "Superlobbyist"? For nearly 20 years, he ran Barbour, Griffith & Rogers LLC, which Fortune named the most powerful lobbying firm in Washington in 2001. Today, BGR's clients include:

• Pharmaceutical companies and associations (Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, PhRMA, Wyeth)
• Oil companies (O2Diesel, Rompetrol)
  
• Health insurers and associations (The American Association of PPOs, UnitedHealth)
• A tobacco company (Lorillard)
• Various parties involved in the mortgage crisis (Citigroup, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas, the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America)
  
• And, of course, overseas governments of dubious benevolence (Qatar, Serbia)

Needless to say, everybody loves a tobacco/oil/insurance/Serbia lobbyist.

Also, speaking of Haley Barbour being like Trent Lott: a 1982 New York Times story* on Barbour's failed Senate race of that year included this charming vignette:

The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be 'coons' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.

That'll play in Peoria.

*Link is to a 2003 Boston Globe op-ed quoting the 1982 NYT article. The original article is available here, behind the Times' pay wall.

See previous Veepstakes Gong Show posts.