WINNING THE BOURBON PRIMARY

America is in crisis, it's desperately in need of leaders who can help get us out of our current morass -- and yet this is why the press is going to try to make one self-satisfied slickster into a contender for the presidency:

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....

NBC News political director Chuck Todd says [Haley] 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... "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."

... 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....

But ... but ... don't those sincerely anti-establishment tea party types and other members of the GOP base loathe insider wheeler-dealers like Barbour? I think Dave Weigel answers that correctly:

You could expect rival Republican candidates to attack Barbour's lobbying record, but Republican voters haven't shown much interest in the lobbying = bad narrative, or even the narrative that Washington connections are undesirable -- I don't recall massive votes against Roy Blunt in Missouri and Rob Portman in Ohio. It would be easier than a lot of people think for Barbour to brand himself as an anti-Washington candidate while remaining accessible to Washington reporters.

I agree. I don't think it hurts Barbour one bit with Republican voters, teabag or otherwise, to be perceived as the slickest, fattest porker at the trough -- hell, in Florida the 'pubs voted in Rick Scott. They don't hate lobbyists. To Republicans, lobbying is free speech. Lobbying is something bidness does. The bad thing about lobbying isn't that businesses do it -- businesses, after all, are saintly, exalted engines of wealth and freedom -- it's that they have to do it with government, which is unspeakably evil. However, government isn't quite as evil when it's in the hands of an unabashed, unapologetic corpocrat who doesn't try to spread evil socialist Hitlerian progressivism, but just agrees to give bidness whatever the hell it asks for. Someone like, y'know, George W. Bush. Or Haley Barbour.

The only reason Barbour probably can't win the nomination is that he won't have the sense to update his image by using grab-your-pitchforks teabag language. If he were to do that, no 'pub voter would think it was in any way hypocritical; however, he's just going to talk the way he does to reporters. That's not going to work in a field that will be to rabble-rousing demagoguery what the '27 Yankees were to baseball.