Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's announcement that he won’t seek the Presidency was no real surprise. His candidacy from the start was the longest of long shots. He consistently polled low single-digit figures among those that GOP voters said they'd back.
His shoot-from-the lip defense of the White Citizens Councils and then tepid backtrack on that defense, and his feigned cluelessness about the brutality of Southern racism and the accomplishments of the civil rights struggle, typed him in the minds of millions as a borderline unreconstructed apologist for the Southern way of life, white bigotry.
Barbour’s tenure as George W. Bush’s go-to money guy as head of the Republican National Committee didn't help. This typed him as the antithesis of what voters say they are against in a Presidential candidate, a Beltway, corporate-tuned, political wheeler-dealer insider. Even if Barbour did not tote a storage locker of personal and political baggage, his candidacy would have been just as stillborn. GOP voters have turned ice cold toward most of the crop of would-be candidates.
A Pew Research Center survey in mid-April amply reflected the sheer lack of enthusiasm for the presumed contenders. In fact, Pew found that voters, including a significant percent of GOP voters, were hard-pressed to name some contenders, let alone what they stood for. Worse still, the names the public knows, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Donald Trump, they either dismiss as sideshow distractions or express intensive dislike for.
He Tilted Too Much
Barbour fit in between candidates that were either disliked because of his racial gaffes, if not sentiments, or simply his X factor views on the issues. The GOP candidate who has any chance of toppling a sitting President cannot be seen as a partisan ideologue, regional mouthpiece and an entrenched party functionary. Barbour had all three of those strikes against him. He will have to have strong appeal to moderate and conservative independents. In recent elections, they are the voters who make or break Presidents or Presidential candidates. Barbour never could hope to have strong enough appeal to them.
A competitive GOP candidate cannot be seen as a religious fundamentalist zealot — so doggedly anti-abortion, gay rights, and pro-school prayer to be seen as a hopeless captive of the radical right. This will cause millions of independents to cringe and backpeddle. Those limitations are narrowing the field. Then there is the question of time. It is working hard against the would-be contenders.
It Takes a Cast Iron Stomach
Barbour would have had to raise millions quickly, build a national organization, spend weeks on the circuit shmoozing with state and local party officials and voters, and get as much face and microphone time as he could before the national media to get the requisite name identification and stir the enthusiasm that a GOP presidential contender will need against the incumbent President. Barbour, by his own admission, did not have the fire in the belly for that kind of Herculean task with the all-important Iowa caucus only eight months away.
But Barbour is by no means alone in trying to accomplish the task of building up a fervent national name and following in the scant months left to the start of the primary season. The others are in the same boat. The only two GOP contenders with solid political credentials who have built up a modicum of a following nationally and are well-known are Mitt Romney and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. The Pew Poll and the Public Policy Polling confirmed they would at least be competitive in a matchup with Obama. But Huckabee and Romney both pack more than a little baggage. Huckabee’s flaw is his hard tie to the religious right. Romney’s is the health care law that he pushed through as Massachusetts governor, which GOP voters think looks too much like the one President Obama pushed through, and they don't like.
Romney also is seen by Tea Party leaders and legions of Tea Party activists as too moderate, too establishment, too conciliatory with the Democrats on issues of debt reduction, the budget and spending. He would almost certainly take heat and barbs from the Palin, Bachman, and Limbaugh right-wing hardliners.
Barbour did the smart thing. He stuck his political pinky to the wind, saw the way it was blowing and quickly decided he could not stir a faint breeze in the rough-and-tumble Presidential derby. The first to go, he won't be the last. GOP voters will see to that.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk shows on Pacifica and KTYM radio, 1460-AM.
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