Mississippi Governor In Play As GOP Strategist and 2012 Prospect

Haley Barbour is a man of iron discipline these days, with nothing unpleasant to say about any fellow Republican. He'd rather bury you with data about workforce training, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, energy and housing.

He once worked in the White House as Ronald Reagan's political director and he helped lead his party back to power on Capitol Hill as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Now he's the governor of Mississippi, deep in the weeds of state policy and increasingly showing up on lists of potential GOP saviors.

Haley in 2012? Hey, the timing's right. His second term ends in 2011 and term limits mean he can't run again. And his party is in dire straits – just like it was when he took over the RNC after Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president.

During a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters Wednesday, Barbour joked about his career. "I'm a lobbyist, a politician and a lawyer. I mean, I've got the big three," he said.

The lobbyist part would be the most complicated if he ran for president. His firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, was among the most powerful in the country and took in millions of dollars representing the tobacco industry. Also, he says he really likes earmarks – the pet congressional projects that have come to symbolize wasteful pork-barrel spending -- because they allow states to set their own spending priorities.

Still, as the GOP looks for its version of The One, who doesn't have baggage? Nobody could have more than former Florida governor/presidential son/presidential brother Jeb Bush. Or former House speaker Newt Gingrich. Or Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. And yet they all make top-Republican lists.

Barbour, 61, deflects questions about his future. Asked about his plans after 2011, he replies, "You can look for me not to run fo re-election." You can also look for him next month in Iowa and New Hampshire -- which traditionally kick off the presidential primary season with their influential contests.

While it's becoming less of a stretch to see Barbour as a candidate in 2012, right now he's making some of those "influential Republicans" lists because of his strategic skills. He could be pivotal to his party's revival – if Republicans will listen to him.

So far that's not happening. Barbour is a big tent Republican living in a shrunken tent. Gallup reports erosion in almost every demographic group, and prominent conservatives are forcing prominent moderates out of the party.

The latest casualties are Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter (he supported President Obama's economic stimulus package and, facing punishment in a contested GOP primary, became a Democrat); and former secretary of state Colin Powell (dismissed by talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh and former vice president Dick Cheney as no longer Republican, he countered this week in Boston, saying they're wrong and "there's another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again").

Barbour on Wednesday declined frequent opportunities to criticize fellow Republicans. "It's hard to do that from afar," he said when asked to assess GOP chairman Michael Steele's rocky tenure so far.

"I think Dick Cheney is a very thoughtful, serious person," he said when asked if the former vice president's PR offensive is doing the party good or ill.

"I didn't know Newt said that," he said, twice, when asked if he agreed with Gingrich that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should resign. "I'm not here to call for anybody to resign except for some newspaper guys I know."

Barbour says his party is very competitive in this year's gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey and is starting to form new policy-oriented groups that are necessary to rebuild.

Still, he makes clear that he thinks mistakes are being made. Start with a failed proposal before the RNC this week to refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Socialist Party. "That's not useful," he said.

As for Steele's declaration Tuesday that the GOP is rebounding and "the corner has been turned," Barbour said, "I'm not sure I'd characterize it exactly that way."

Steele has been all over the media in his first few months, and it hasn't been smooth. Among other things, he's had to back off controversial statements about abortion, Limbaugh's role in the party and penalties for GOP senators who don't toe the party line.

Without mentioning Steele's high profile, Barbour said he was criticized in his early months as party chairman for traveling outside Washington too much and not being visible enough. He said he was trying to strengthen the grassroots and create "self-reliant state parties," and that remains the best way to rebuild the party.

Similarly, Barbour did not mention the names of Specter, Powell or other moderates, but he said the party should be "big enough for all our people to feel comfortable."

When he was chairman, he recalled, friends teased him for campaigning for Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords. Jeffords was the most liberal Republican in the Senate, Barbour said, but he was also the most conservative member of the Vermont delegation and the best the GOP was going to do. "They were not going to elect Haley Barbour senator from Vermont," he said in his deep Yazoo City drawl.

No one would mistake Barbour for a moderate. Last week at the National Rifle Association annual meeting in Phoenix, he said he felt a "much more powerful" appreciation of the Second Amendment after Hurricane Katrina, when the Gulf Coast was chaotic and people needed to defend themselves. He said his most quoted remark in connection with the storm was that in Mississippi, people who shoot looters wouldn't be prosecuted. "We didn't have much looting," Barbour said dryly, drawing laughs.

Barbour is a sharp critic of Obama's policies in general – they are "very far left," will create a huge government and carry "enormous" costs, he says, particularly the president's plans to make it more expensive to pollute.

Unlike 15 years ago, when Barbour was a party chairman, he now has policies of his own to explain and defend, such as a 50-cent-per-pack cigarette tax increase he just signed, and his decision to reject certain federal unemployment funds because they would have forced his state to change its eligibility rules, and raise taxes after they ran out.

He can talk at length about his workforce training initiatives, his state's low Medicaid error rate, GDP and energy output, Medicare, hospital shares and Part D. After one of several discourses during breakfast, he stopped, paused and grinned. "Is that titillating or what?" he asked.

Far from it, and that was the whole point.