Southern Political Report – Barbour the adult during BP oil crisis
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is a rarity into today’s political world of media breathlessness and partisan blindness. He’s the countrified tortoise leading a pack of condescending hares.
Barbour has been the adult in the crowd from Day One of the Gulf oil spill. All along he’s called for restraint in both media words and government deeds. While many elected officials and most media were predicting an environmental apocalypse from the Deepwater Horizon accident, Barbour early-on took a political risk by expressing open skepticism that significant amounts of oil would ever reach the Gulf coast.
A hundred days later, he’s apparently been vindicated. What an irony, and what a lesson. This portly, thick-drawled Southern politician was right, while an army of supposedly infallible scientists and told-you-so environmentalists were wrong. (Even Time Magazine is now saying the damage from the spill apparently isn’t anything close to what most thought it would be.)
While President Obama (Democrat), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (Republican), and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (independent) indulged in rhetorical hyperventilation, Barbour kept his cool. As a result of his early judgment about the spill, Barbour’s already high approval rating among Mississippians has topped 70 percent, and talk of a presidential run in 2012 has been fanned into a discernable flame.
Southern Political Report
7/30/10
