Haley Barbour announced yesterday that he will not be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Immediately some pundits cranked out columns about What It All Means. I’m with Nate Silver– Barbour was fairly irrelevant in the race for the GOP presidential nomination.
Barbour’s candidacy was taken seriously by the Republican establishment, but I just didn’t see him capturing any popular following, even among Republicans. Nate notes that Barbour has relatively low name recognition among voters, but even voters who know who he is showed little interest in voting for him. Nate continues,
Nor did Mr. Barbour have an obvious constituency within the party. Religious conservatives had more natural choices (Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum), as did Tea Party conservatives (Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich), Republican establishment voters (Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty), moderates (Mitch Daniels and Jon Huntsman) and marginally attached, low-information voters (Donald Trump and Sarah Palin.)
Mike Huckabee actually is looking stronger than any other GOP candidate in most polls I’ve seen these days. However, I understand Huckabee is not popular with the fiscal conservatives, and he doesn’t have much support within the establishment. What the GOP wants is a “serious” establishment candidate who also can capture the passionate devotion of the base, and right now I don’t think there is such a candidate.
Haley, we hardly knew ye.
Not that we wanted to know ye.
And had you run, we’d have come
not to praise, but to bury ye.
I wonder to which candidate(s) all of the fans of Boss Hogg and “The Dukes of Hazzard” will jump to now?
Dirtly old man and sexist pig that I am, I was hoping he’d contine to run. Only because I hoped that there would be tons of Catherine Bach look alikes in their “Daisy Duke” short shorts I could ogle at rallies.
Look, I’d rather that than if Huckabee runs, where all of the women will be wearing the latest in “Little House on the Prarie” fashions with Christian neo-Burka hats.
And in other news equally as exciting, I am calling a press conference today at 3PM to announce that I’m not running for President.
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Badtux,
Why the Hell not?
Try it. Just dip your webbed feet in the water to see how it is! Bad tux an all, you’d be faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar better than anyone on the Republican side.
I remember seeing some graffiti written on a latrine wall in Vietnam many years ago. It read: Nixon, pull out like your father should have! That graffiti would could apply equally as well to Haley Barbour..pull out like your father should have!
Haley Barbour withdraws, precluding a next generation of little Barbours, thank the Lord.