Governor Haley Barbour Remembers Paul Gallo: Legacy, Influence, and Mississippi's Future

Well, a great man to remember. He was such a pathfinder in Mississippi. Well, at the same time, as Phil Bryant said earlier on your show, he was somebody we looked up to, somebody that made a difference, but at the same time his ego was in check. He wasn't full of himself. He was just good folks, and he did make a difference for Mississippi. I was elected governor in 2003 and went in in 2004, but I had worked with him while I was Republican National Committee chairman in the 1990s. And Phil was making the point that Paul was always very up to the facts. I mean, he knew what was going on. But that applied to the national government too. I mean, when Bill Clinton was president and I was national party chairman, we would talk on the Gallow show about what was going on in Washington, and you know, Hillarycare and gun control and all the things that people in Mississippi did not approve of from Bill Clinton.

You know, one of the things that has stood out is not everybody agreed with Paul. Sometimes people that were Republicans didn't agree with Paul, but especially on the other side. And yet he was able to find a way to a lot of times bridge that gap, and there ended up being mutual respect. We talked with Steve Holland earlier this morning. He said they didn't like each other, didn't like each other, and then one day they realized, you know what, this is pretty good radio, and there was a respect and a friendship that grew out of that. And Paul had the ability to do that. Well, he did. And you know, Steve was in the legislature when I was governor, but he and I went back to the 1978 Cochran for Senate campaign. He was already in the legislature, but he lived in Tupelo, and I got to know him during that. And you know, Steve came on a lot harder than he really was. I mean, he wanted to show how tough he was, but at the end of the day, he was for doing what he thought was best for Mississippi. And sometimes we agreed. He's the guy that told me that we need to reform Medicaid, that there were a whole lot of people on Medicaid that had been allowed to be put on there, and the legislature voted for me to trim Medicaid, and we took 60,000 people off the rolls and hardly noticed the difference. And Steve Holland deserves credit for that.

Well, no question about that. And I appreciate what you said about me. My family's been here on my daddy's side since right after the Civil War, and my mama's family were chalk dolls. We were here to meet the boat. So we go back so far. I mean, my great-great-great-great-grandfather was Walter Leake, who was the third governor of Mississippi, and Leake County is named for him. And so I'm proud of that. I'm proud of being from Mississippi. I'm proud of my service to Mississippi. But this is, to me, this is an easy place to want to help. Sometimes it is easy to help, but it's an easy place to want to help. And lots of people showed that after Katrina. We had nearly a million volunteers who came to Mississippi in the first five years and registered with some church or some charity or some organization. Nearly a million people. And I think Mississippians ought to be proud of that, that they were somebody that people from all over the country came and helped people they didn't know, and all they could remember when they left was how everybody said thank you.

He was the incredibly successful pioneer of talk radio in Mississippi, and did it in a way that he was able to do it for 30 years and still had a gigantic audience, and still was somebody that you could turn on and expect to see some common sense.