Yeah, I’m sure Haley Barbour would make a whale of a presidential candidate. His delusional and pro-drilling rhetoric since the spill started in the Gulf have enabled him to “help shift his political image from that of an insider party boss to an out-front crisis manager — and possible presidential candidate in 2012.” How’s this gonna sound on the trail?
VAN SUSTEREN: Governor, I have a little audio problems, I must confess. But let me ask you about tomorrow’s meeting with the president with the BP officials. What is it that you want to hear him ask and discuss tomorrow?
BARBOUR: Well, look, BP is responsible to pay for everything. If BP is the responsible party under the law, they’re to pay for everything. I do worry that this idea of making them make a huge escrow fund is going to make it less likely that they’ll pay for everything. They need their capital to drill wells. They need their capital to produce income so that they can pay that income to our citizens in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and to pay for all the damages done. BP needs to pay, is supposed to pay, must pay every penny. But this escrow bothers me that it’s going to make them less able to pay us what they owe us. And that concerns me.
How is it going to make it less likely that BP will pay for everything if they put $20 billion up front at $5 billion per year? If $5 billion per year is going to bankrupt them, then they’re not paying everything back anyway.
And then there is this:
He has also made a smattering of offense-bringing remarks over the years. Most recently, he defended Gov. Robert F. McDonnell’s omission of slavery from his Confederate History Month proclamation in Virginia, saying the uproar was “just a nit” and “something that doesn’t matter for diddly.”
If that’s not a winner with the youth vote, maybe this will win them over.
Mr. Barbour has been generally muted in his criticism of BP and was among the first Republicans to object to the Obama administration’s insistence on a $20 billion BP escrow account to settle damage claims. He has also warned against efforts by the left to turn the spill into a regulatory cause célèbre.
“A bunch of liberal elites were hoping this would be the Three Mile Island of offshore drilling,” Mr. Barbour recently told the Mississippi Manufacturers Association.
I live in Pennsylvania. Three Mile Island was a molehill compared to the Gulf spill, and everyone knows it.
But very serious people tell me that Haley Barbour, former tobacco lobbyist, is going to be a great threat in 2012.
