For months now, the two-term governor has been talked about as a potential candidate for the Republican nomination in 2012.
Barbour has a lot of assets in his corner. He is a gifted campaigner, able to shift comfortably between blue-collar voters and corporate CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. He is deeply connected within his party, having served effectively during the mid-1990s as chairman of the Republican National Committee and helping the GOP take control of both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. He is a prolific fund-raiser. He has demonstrated in Mississippi an ability to govern in ways that his predecessors never could — putting the executive branch on equal footing with the legislative. He received a lot of favorable national publicity for his take-charge, get-it-done leadership following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and he has upped his national profile in recent months by taking over early as chairman of the National Republican Governors Association.
All that said, Stu Rothenberg, an astute Washington political analyst who spoke at the annual Delta Council meeting Friday, seems to have it pegged correctly when he says:
1. He doubts Barbour is going to run for president; and
2. Even if Barbour did, he’d be a longshot to win the nomination, much less unseat Barack Obama.
Rothenberg, who writes a twice-a-week column for Roll Call, Capitol Hill's leading newspaper, says that while he likes and admires Barbour, the governor has a couple of major liabilities for a presidential bid.
First, since he comes from Mississippi, Barbour is identified in heavily regional terms. His thick Mississippi drawl only reinforces the image that he’s a sectional candidate to voters who live outside of the South.
Second, Barbour’s pre-governor days as a well-heeled Washington lobbyist would be a handicap. “I hear being a lobbyist is not a good thing these days,” Rothenberg said with a heavy dose of understatement. On a presidential campaign trail, Barbour would be bloodied for his past financial connections to Big Tobacco, Big Banking and now Big Oil.
Regardless of whom the Republicans nominate, Rothenberg’s crystal ball has 2012 tilting toward re-election of Obama. It’s terribly difficult to unseat an incumbent unless the economy is tanking, and most economists are predicting that the business cycle will be turning upward just in time for the president’s re-election campaign.
Assessing the Republicans’ chances against Obama, Rothenberg summed it up:
“I don’t think they can beat him, but he can lose if the national political environment is as bad or worse than it is now. But I don’t expect that to happen.”
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