Barbour, portada del Weekly Standard

The Boy from Yazoo City

(...) Haley Barbour, Mississippi’s favorite son.

Governors move about in a bubble. From home to car to statehouse to plane, from ribbon-cutting to banquet to car to home, they are cushioned in a space built by bustling aides and scary-looking troopers in buzz cuts and plain clothes. In the bubble the governor is king, pasha of his own status-sphere, a singular figure of unchallengeable importance. There’s no one else quite like him in Helena or Jefferson City or Columbus.

And then the bubble transports him to somewhere like the Republican Governors Association conference, held last month at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront. The bubble encounters other bubbles. Awkwardness and disorientation ensue. At the Hilton’s VIP entrance the black SUVs nosed one another to get closer to the red carpet so the pashas could be disgorged. Troopers eyed other troopers and whispered darkly into cuff links. Advance men fidgeted, as they always do, indifferent to all pashas but their own, trying to pick one governor’s luggage from a great dogpile of gubernatorial luggage. At the elevator banks and escalators, in the lobbies and meeting rooms, it was the same: a collision of status-spheres, a paralyzing standoff.

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