Barbour y la prensa nacional

Varios periodistas de Washington DC comentan para The Daily Beast la buena relación del Gobernador Haley Barbour, de Mississippi, con la prensa nacional.

(...) “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.”

As a political reporter for The Washington Post back in the mid-1990s, I (Lloyd Grove) too fell under Barbour’s spell, growing to appreciate his apparent openness, tactical savvy, self-deprecating charm—and generous supply of Maker’s Mark in his handy RNC liquor cabinet.

(...) The Washington Post’s chief political writer, Dan Balz, notes that “Governor Barbour knows a lot of reporters… is comfortable around the press and not defensive in the way he deals with the press. Now whether that will serve him well if he runs for president, I have no idea."

Balz cautions: “When somebody runs for president, they are in a different relationship than they had before with the people in their own party, fellow elected officials, the voters, and the media. It’s just different. I don’t think you can presuppose that whatever the relationship was with any of those folks will necessarily remain the same. In fact, you can confidently say it won’t. There’s a different level of scrutiny."

(...) NBC News political director Chuck Todd says Barbour could benefit from his elite media connections. “I always say that dealing with the media is like dealing with any other human being, and he treats us as human beings,” says Todd, co-anchor of the MSNBC morning show The Daily Rundown. “He’s also a great quote. I think there’s definitely an old-schoolishness about him that Obama doesn’t have—maybe a bridge to the three-martini lunch, something from back in the good old days which reporters now know nothing about. A potential problem for him, in the Republican primary process, would be to be seen as an elite-media creature of Washington with a Southern accent.”

On the other hand, says one veteran Washington political journalist, “the fact that Haley makes himself so available to the media might help him explain away his lobbying activities” or other potentially damaging stories about backroom deal-making in Mississippi. “Reporters might be more willing to put such problems in ‘context,’ ” says this journalist.

Ronald Brownstein, editorial director of the National Journal Group, points out that Barbour “is held in tremendous respect in the mainstream political media—certainly those around to experience ’94 and the aftermath know him to be a very shrewd guy… No one I know who was around then underestimates his skill and sophistication. But that doesn’t prevent you from recognizing that he has obvious hurdles and baggage.

Brownstein adds: “What’s interesting is that, unlike some of the other people mentioned as Republican candidates, he doesn’t feel he has to position himself as an antagonist at war with the press. That just isn’t part of his shtick. He sees that everybody has a legitimate role to play in the political ecosystem.”

Yet for all his juice among longtime Washington journalists, Barbour would be well-advised to look in his rear-view mirror—in which objects may be closer than they appear. “It is my impression that there is one guy busy wrapping up media elites and nobody is yet in second place,” says Roger Simon, Politico’s chief political columnist. “That guy is Mitt Romney.” (...)