Haley Barbour's No-Regrets Style: Edith Piaf with a Mississippi Accent

-- "Thank You for Smoking," by Christopher Buckley

On my way to a Wednesday reporters' breakfast with two-term Mississippi Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, I remembered that passage from one of the great comic novels about the malleable ethics of Washington. Three years after the Buckley satire was published in 1994, Barbour -- then a tobacco lobbyist -- snuck a $50-billion tax credit for tobacco companies into a (you can't make this stuff up) Clinton balanced-budget bill. So, referring to the Buckley book, I asked Barbour (a probable 2012 presidential contender) whether being a former tobacco lobbyist would be an asset.

Since Barbour, a former GOP national chairman, may be the least rueful figure in politics, I was not expecting the 62-year-old governor to don sackcloth and sanctimoniously apologize for his prior lucrative career decisions. "I'm a lawyer, a lobbyist and politician – that's the trifecta," he replied with a practiced lack of remorse. But then Barbour unexpectedly added, "You should know that I used to be on the board of directors of Blount International, which owned Federal Cartridge. I didn't get to lobby for the gun industry, but I was on the board of directors of the holding company of one."

Whoever imagined that tiny Edith Piaf ("Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien") would be reincarnated as a big-bellied, magnolia-accented Southern governor wearing a white shirt with Ronald Reagan cufflinks? (Barbour, who got his start with the 1968 Nixon campaign, was White House political director in Reagan's second term).

Back in February, Barbour said about the 2012 presidential nomination -- in one of those lines that political junkies will be quoting for decades -- "If you see me losing 40 pounds that means I'm either running or have cancer." As the head of the Republican Governors Association, which has a far bigger bankroll than the national party, Barbour remains a political heavy-weight in all respects. Asked about his waistline at Wednesday's breakfast, sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Barbour announced that he had Tuesday night's dinner at Morton's Steakhouse, which has never been a temple of low-cal cuisine. Barbour did pointedly add that he had ordered fish.

Haley Barbour understands the rituals of politics -- and, as a result, there are some topics on which he recites yawn-inducing canned answers. Pressed about his 2012 campaign plans, he insisted, "I'm not giving serious thought to running for president until after the November elections. As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, I am giving all my time and energy and political mindshare to electing Republican governors. And I do have a full-time job as governor of Mississippi. I haven't given that [the White House] the least bit of thought."

By any sensible reckoning, speculation about the 2012 nomination field is, of course, ludicrously premature. But for decades, there has been nothing sensible about presidential politics or the ambitions of those who see themselves redecorating the Oval Office. Four years ago this month, a freshly minted senator named Barack Obama electrified Iowa Democrats at Sen. Tom Harkin's annual steak fry -- and thereby sparked his candidacy. Next week Sarah Palin will headline the Iowa GOP's annual fundraiser. And so it goes.

Barbour, in a sense, would be a throwback to the kind of candidate who used to be nominated on the fifth ballot of a deadlocked convention -- a proven warhorse whose competence and credibility had been vetted by party leaders. These days, though, being buff (think George W. Bush, Al Gore during his clingy earth-tone T-shirt phase and Obama) appears as important politically as having the right stuff. And collecting pornography may burnish a political resume more than a lengthy career at the pinnacle of persuasion-for-hire industry in Washington.

But, if he does run, Haley Barbour will offer the one attribute that few politicians can successfully fake -- authenticity. Even though he is the ultimate Washington insider ("I don't shy away from my career as a lobbyist -- I was a pretty good one"), Barbour also radiates a sense of place. Both his accent and his colorful vernacular convey the Deep South as surely as Lyndon Johnson was a creature of the Texas Hill Country. Talking about Obama's role in the 2010 campaign, Barbour cracked, "Democrats are running from him like scalded dogs."

At Wednesday's breakfast, Barbour provided hints of his potential difficulty in mastering the language of conspiratorial anger that animates the right wing. He appeared to pander by giving a particularly tepid answer to a question about those voters who have convinced themselves (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that Obama is a Muslim. "This is a president that we know less about than any other president in history," Barbour said cryptically before adding, "I accept just totally at face value that he is a Christian. He said so throughout the time that he has been in public life."

But minutes later, the Mississippi governor enlisted in the beleaguered battalion of Republican pragmatists. Asked about the suggestion of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (another non-flashy potential 2012 GOP contender) that Republicans call a "truce" on social issues, Barbour joined in the call saying, "The voters have on their minds the economy, jobs, spending, deficits, debt and taxes. And campaigns are about issues that are on people's minds." But just to be on the safe side, Barbour quickly threw in, "I'll put up my bona fides as a social conservative against anyone."

Of course, the bona fides that Haley Barbour have to worry about relate to his career working his way along the corridors of power in Washington. Unless he can get Christopher Buckley to write a campaign biography entitled, "Thank You for Lobbying."