A Conversation with Governor Haley Barbour

Thank you, Keith. Thanks for having me.

My grandfather, my father's father was a judge and he was close to Senator Jim Eastland, Democrat senator from Mississippi. He was elected in 1941 and my granddaddy was very active in his campaign. And so I was around political people, but my dad died when I was two years old and his little brother who was a year younger than me took over our family law firm and he was on the Democratic county committee. But my oldest brother came home from the army in 1965 with cold water Republican and in 1968 he ran for mayor of our hometown. And we have spring elections. He was going to run as a Republican but turned out the Republicans didn't have a line on the ballot because nobody ever run as a Republican in city Mississippi. So he ran as an independent, got elected. Almost two weeks later, I ran for president student body at Ole Miss and lost. But interestingly, it was a good break for me because the summer of 68 came along, the Nixon campaign, my brother had got put on state Republican committee. He called me and he said, 'Talk to some of the guys that I'm going to college with that are graduating and see if any of you like to work in the Nixon campaign.' So, I called about four of my friends and they all had jobs like you're supposed to. So, I called my brother whose name's Jebby and I said, 'Jebby, why I do it? I don't have to go back. If I won the election, I couldn't not go back, but I didn't.' So he talked to the state party chairman and they hired me to win 30 counties for next George Wallace of course on the other side. George Wallace was the competition. I'll never forget the first time I ever saw a political poll. Six percent of Mississippians identified as Republicans. I used to say that you had to be an optimist to be a Republican in Mississippi in 1968. But we got 14% of the vote for Nixon and of course Nixon won the election. And I went back to finish undergraduate school and I got called by the state party chairman and asked would I like to run the census. And so I said yes. Sounds like it'd be pretty cool. 22 years old, didn't have a college degree. The government gave me 27,000 employees. And to take our census, it got me off to a good start. Growing up around a law firm, you really don't learn much about business, you know, but this was a real, you know, they dumped me into the business world. Having all those employees and the huge amounts of money that we were spending in those days. But after I finished the census, I went to law school and then the next year was 72 and they asked me to come run the Nixon campaign for the state. After I did that, I became executive director of the state party. Of course, we won the state in 72, but more importantly from my perspective, we elected two new Republican congressmen to two open seats, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott. Both of them had long really great careers in the House and in the Senate. Cochran served six years in the House and then Senator Eastland retired. In 78, Thad ran and won. I managed his general election campaign and so I was kind of hooked on politics.

Well, thank you. I had something to do with it, but the Cochran lot and then we elected a Republican governor in 1991. But going back to 76, I had been executive director of the state party. I ran the Cochran campaign. I worked in the 80 Reagan campaign in 75. Jim Baker called me and asked me if I would be the political director at the White House. And I had worked for Baker in the 76 campaign after Reagan lost at the convention and I had been for Reagan. The Ford people hired me to run seven states in the South for Ford, which was a great experience and awesome guy where I knew more and more people, which would make a big difference when I ran for party chairman. But Baker asked me to be political director of the White House. I'd accepted. My wife and I had come up for the Ford campaign and rented an apartment for three months. We had a two-year-old and when this came up, were we going to move to Washington? And we decided no, we're going to raise our kids in Mississippi. They would come up for the southerners and then I would try to meet them every couple weeks. But at the Reagan White House, I'll never forget Lee Atwater who had been in the office before before I was there. Atwater said at the White House, you could be whatever you want to be as long as you use good judgment and can do it right. So, I ran a political office. Mitch Daniels was my boss who later became governor of Indiana. And we started taking a political office and expanding it. We took some of the business side and kind of put it under our corner. But again, I had a great relationship with the president and he, I always tell people Reagan always treated me like he knew like he was my peer when he knew I knew he was not my peer that I was not his peer either. But I wouldn't give anything for getting to work for Reagan. But Baker sort of took an eye for me because he left to become Secretary of Treasury when I came into the White House in '85, but we stayed close. And then in 88 when Bush won the nomination, ran for president, Dukakis withdrew from the south and Baker made me his overseer for Illinois. We were behind eight points in Illinois and we ended up winning Illinois by three points. Jim Thompson was governor and he was our chairman and Sam Skinner who later was secretary of the cabinet was kind of the CEO and he was guy that I worked with all the time and we still have a great friendship.

Reagan was incredibly popular with the business community and so it was a natural fit for me to let them come in and be part of the action. We had a good time. I used to tell Mitch Daniels he offered me an office in the west wing and I said Mitch, my liquor cabinet in the executive office building is bigger than that office. I don't want to go over there I don't stay over here with my staff. But Bush got elected. Rogers had been my deputy at the White House he became my successor when I left in 87. He became Sununu's chief of staff and then in 1990 or 91 we formed Barbour and Rogers. We had a great time. Bush lost for reelection and I decided to run for national party chairman. And I'd mentioned earlier how the campaigns that I worked with where I worked beyond Mississippi or all the South or Illinois or whatever gave me some real advantages. Of course, when you don't have the White House, the party chairman elections, a real election when you got 165 members on of the national committee. I knew a lot of those people. And Spence Abraham ran against me and John Ashcroft ran against me and the two of them two years later got elected senator.

Kefir, it was harder to raise money in 1993 because we had been in the White House 12 years, but we rebuilt the party really stayed by state. I was criticized at first because of the first few months. I didn't spend much time in Washington. I went out to Arizona and Colorado and Minnesota. We started building the party back from bottom up. And we hadn't had the majority in the House of Representatives since 1954. 40 years between 54 and 94 when we got back in. I attribute part of that to we got our state parties reorganized, re-energized. We got women's federations, college Republicans. We got a party built along the lines that we tried to build the Republican party of Mississippi by. This was a heck of a lot bigger exercise. I had a lot of help.

We really urged the state parties to build for them to build from the bottom up. And of course the 94 election, my first election, we won 54 seats in the House. We won majority in the Senate. But the House, we had a majority since 1954. The Senate, we had the majority for one six-year period from 80 to 86. When Reagan was president, Reagan's election, we elected and then we lost it back. I think the Democrats had ambitions that they were going to do that again after 94 and we held on to both houses and we raised a lot of money. We had a couple of big donor programs which couldn't take corporate money at that time. So we had big donor programs that were people giving out of their pocket, but you'd have CEOs of big companies and they bring their wife and the wife would sit in the meetings and we finally started having wife's meetings so we could talk about policy. We figured out where the power is.

When I went back home after being RNC chairman I didn't have any I didn't have I had made a decision to run for governor. I had thought about it, but we elected our only Republican governor since reconstruction in 1991, Kirk Fordice. Fordice served two terms to 99 and then the Democrat lieutenant governor defeated our Republican candidate for governor. So, we were out. And candidly, after a couple of years, I started getting a lot of people saying, 'This guy's a bad governor, and we're running up deficits. They're taking one-time money and spend it on recurring expenses.' So, when I became governor, we had $160 million deficit. I took 60,000 people off of Medicaid the first three months I was governor because the previous governor didn't take anybody off cuz he probably if they were still on Medicaid they vote for him. I had learned national politics and apply it to the state campaign and to my governorship. One of the things I believe about campaigns is it's easier to beat somebody if they're not just unpopular. You have to give people something to vote for. We use tort reform. We use not raising anybody's taxes but getting the budget balanced. And we used reforms and education. We started off with reforms and workforce training. I had seen in my career all over the country. A lot of big businesses thought if they came to Mississippi that they would not be able to get enough quality workers. And any governor before me will tell you that was some an argument they ran into. And we really changed workforce development, but we took it out of the high schools and put it into the community colleges.

Well, I don't know if we were the first to do that, but we did it in 2004.