Haley Barbour's Secret Weapon

[Guest areafiftyone]

THE DAILY BEAST:

The folksy Mississippi governor has a leg up on the GOP competition if he runs for president: He’s played the press like a violin. Lloyd Grove on his media magic.

When he was running for president and even when he wasn’t, Arizona Sen. John McCain liked to joke that the journalistic establishment was “my base.” In the case of Haley Barbour, it might not be a joke.

The 63-year-old Mississippi governor, who’s considering a 2012 White House run, enjoys the friendliest relations with the Washington media elite of any prospective candidate vying for the Republican nomination. He comes by this enviable position honestly, albeit lubricated by tumblers of good Kentucky bourbon, after toiling for three decades as an adviser to Ronald Reagan’s political operation, as a corporate lobbyist, as a candidate for Senate, as a GOP spin doctor, as a cable television talking head, and as the wildly successful chairman of the Republican National Committee who helped take back the House and Senate in 1994.
With his slow Yazoo City drawl and lightning-quick mind, accentuated by a keen sense of humor and a gift for memorable phrase-making ("If we learned anything from the budget deal,” he once told an unsmiling President George H.W. Bush. “it's that compromising with this Congress is like paying the cannibals to eat you last”), Barbour gives the impression that he actually relishes reporters’ company.

That warm, fuzzy feeling is reciprocated—more often than not on a first-name basis.

“It's not Haley's politics, although his pragmatism so outweighs his partisanship, he looks like Gandhi in our current political atmosphere,” says Bloomberg News columnist and Daily Beast contributor Margaret Carlson, a doyenne of the Washington media-political complex. “He's the Republican Ed Rendell—genuine, approachable, loves what he's doing and makes you love it, and him.”