So Haley Barbour, who seemed like a near-lock to join the Republican field in 2012, has decided to join the ranks of Republican Mario Cuomos instead. It’s an understandable decision: Barbour’s strengths as a politician notwithstanding, his personal profile — a corpulent ex-lobbyist and quintessential Washington insider who’s also the governor of a deep-red state identified with secession and segregation — made him perhaps the least electable of the various would-be establishment candidates, and his famous political acumen was apparently acute enough to recognize that thick rolodexes alone do not a credible candidacy make. (See Gramm, Phil and Connally, John, among others.) Still, his departure leaves a thin G.O.P. field looking thinner (no pun intended), and it removes a candidate who had the wisdom to greet our Libyan intervention with a blunt: “What are we doing in Libya?” For that alone, he will be missed.
As the Republican field currently stands, Barbour’s exit plainly benefits Mitt Romney. But if we include the various fence-sitters, Chris Cillizza has it right: both Mitch Daniels and Mike Huckabee just saw their paths to the nomination get a lot clearer. Without his friend Haley in the race, Daniels has a better chance to consolidate a strong base of donors and operatives, and make himself the plausible insider-ish alternative to Romney. And with the Mississippi governor on the sidelines, Huckabee would be the only real southerner in the race, and there’s every reason to think that most of the south would be solidly behind him.
Indeed, a race with Huckabee, Romney, Daniels and Tim Pawlenty might break down along regional as much as ideological lines: Romney would presumably dominate the northeast (and certain parts of the mountain west, of course), Huckabee the south, Daniels and Pawlenty would compete to be the midwestern candidate — and then the campaign would probably turn on the primaries in big, diverse states like Florida (and maybe Texas and California, if it dragged on long enough). It would be a more old-fashioned kind of a primary campaign, in a sense, than the populist-versus-establishment clash that everyone expects — and perhaps a healthier one as well.
But of course it’s just as likely that Huckabee and Daniels will both stay on the sidelines, drinking mint juleps with Barbour and chuckling at all the poor fools demeaning themselves by sharing a stage with Donald Trump.
