A Conversation with Governor Haley Barbour

In this episode of What’s Going On in the Statehouse, Keiffer Mitchell sits down with Haley Barbour, former Mississippi governor, RNC chairman, Reagan White House advisor, and co-founder of BGR Group. Barbour traces his rise from working on the Nixon campaign to leading efforts for Ford in the South, serving in the Reagan White House, chairing the RNC, and ultimately winning two terms as governor of Mississippi, where he led the state through Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in American history. He also reflects on his career as one of Washington’s most effective lobbyists, from his early days to building BGR into a leading public affairs firm.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good afternoon. Welcome to another episode of What's Going On in the State House. I'm Kiefer Mitchell, Vice President here at BGR Group. And today we have the honor of having former governor of the state of Mississippi, founder of BGR Group, Governor Haley Barber. Welcome, Governor Barber.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Thank you, Keith. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

So, Governor Barber, you served as two terms as the governor of Mississippi. You've served as the chair of the Republican National Committee. You were a political advisor, a key advisor for President Ronald Reagan. And so I thought that we'd just start off today and just talk about your early formation in the politics, getting involved, where it all began.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

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 he, 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, a Gold War 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 it turned out the Republicans didn't allow the ballot because nobody ever won as a Republican in Yazi City, Mississippi. So he ran as an independent, got elected. Almost two weeks later, I ran for president Stewart 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 gotten put on the 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 them would like to work in the Nixon campaign. So I called about four of my friends. They all had jobs like you're supposed to. So I called my brother whose name's Jeppy, and I said, Jeppy, why I'd do it? I don't have to go back. If I won the election, I 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. Hubert Humphrey. George Wallace was the competition. I'll never forget the first time I ever saw a political poll, Kiefer. Six, six percent of Mississippians identified as Republicans. I used to say that you had to be an optimist to be a Republican in Mississippian in 1968. But we got 14% of the vote for Nixon. And of course, Nixon won the election. And I went back to to finish undergraduate school. And uh 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 you really don't learn much about business, you know, but this was a real, you know, they dunked me into the business world. Having all those employees and the hu 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 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, Fad Cochran and Trent Law. 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. Fav ran and won. I managed his general election campaign. And so I was kind of hooked on politics.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Let's fast forward up to your time as President of Reagan's, Ronald Reagan's political director for a campaign, and when he was in the White House, and also your your time as chairman of the RNC, because you obviously you cut your teeth in politics in Mississippi. Back then it was a Democratic state, and then you were able to turn it around to get more Republicans elected.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Well, uh, thank you. I I had something to do with it, but the Cochrane and 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 Cochrane campaign. I worked in the 80 Reagan campaign. In 75, Jim Baker called me and asked me if I would be the political director of the White House. And I had worked for Baker in the 76th 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 also got me where I knew more and more people, which would make a big difference when I ran for party chairman. But uh Baker asked me to be uh 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 Summers, and then I would try to meet them every couple of weeks. But at the Reagan White House, uh never forget Lee Atwater, who had been in the office before before I was there. Uh 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 the political office. Mitch Daniels was my boss, who later became governor of Indiana. And w w we started taking the 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. He I always tell people, well, 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 uh 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 and 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 the Secretary of the Cabinet, was kind of the CEO, and he was the guy that I worked with all the time, and we still have great friendship.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Right after you left for the White House, you opened up the lobbying shop, and you, under the political office, started cultivating some of these businesses that were looking to do business with the White House and the administration.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

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 every executive mobs building bigger than that office. I don't want to go over there. I want to stay over here with my task. But Bush got elected. Ed 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 Barber and Rogers. We had a great time. Bush lost for reelection, and I decided to run for national party chair. And I 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 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.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Now, was it harder to raise money as the chair of the Republican Party during that time when you were out of power, or because of the cultivation of the relationships you made throughout your experience and doing campaigns in the Reagan administration and businesses, was it easier to raise money?

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Kever, it was harder to raise money in 1993 because we had been in the White House 12 years. But we rebuilt the party really state 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.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

But that experience in your early days of your career in Mississippi, going by county by county, really paid off dividends as the party chair. Instead of, you know, governing from the top, you went straight down to the precinct captains, county leaders, and all that.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

We really urged the the state parties to bill for them to bill from the bar 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 hadn't 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'd bring their wife, and the wife would sit in the meetings and say, we finally started having wife's beads so we could talk about power, we'd figure out where the power is.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

So you took your experience as chair to RNC, doing your grassroots party building, that sort of thing, and then went back to Mississippi to run for governor.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

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 Fordyce. Fordyce 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, that they're taking one time money and spending it on recurring expenses. So when I became governor, we had a $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. Because he Paul of Fay was still on Medicaid, they vote for him. I had learned national politics and apply it to the state campaign and to by 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. We took it out of the high schools and put it into the community colleges.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

So you're sort of ahead of your time because now you've seen a lot of states, a lot of programs of workforce development going to the community colleges and bargaining with businesses.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

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

SPEAKER_00 17:10

So you're ahead, I would say you're ahead of your time.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Well, I hope so. I hope so. So we try to be. That's one of the things about being governor. Governors look to each other. What what are they what are they doing in Maryland? And now I can tell you, you don't always look to where there's a reform could go. Sometimes there's a guy like Ed Rendell in Pennsylvania and does something that you think we ought to try there.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

So you're governor, and then a huge storm takes place in the Gulf of Mexico. Katrina, you have got a lot of accolades because of the leadership you exhibited during that period of Katrina. Take us through that. And then I would love to hear about your relationship with the legislature, because you're the governor of Mississippi. You're now in command of a state of emergency, but you had a democratic legislature, both houses that could put up roadblocks that they wanted to, but you took charge. Walk us through your experience with that hurricane.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Well, Katrina was at the time the worst natural disaster in American history. And as it turned out, we had to get federal laws changed, not just to get folks what we were entitled to under existing law, we had to get it changed. The storm came in on Monday morning, August 29th, 2005. On Friday before that, we had a meeting of six counties of elected officials that are the bottom six counties in the state. And superintendent schools from Harrison County, which is the biggest county on the coast, got up and said, You're a Republican. And most of us are Democrats. Somebody's got to be in charge. We're willing to make a deal with you that we'll do what you say on one condition. And I said, Well, Superintendent, what's that? He said, that you will listen to us. Not that you'll do what we say, but you'll at least hear us out. And I said, done. And by the next day, we had set up a unified command of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management AC, and NEMA, the Mississippi, the Emergency Management AC. And we quickly got that running. And when I say quit, we're within 48 hours. The storm hit about eight o'clock in the morning, and it hit on the Gulf Coast, right where Louisiana and Mississippi meet, where the Pearl River runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Kiefer, people that are from the Gulf states know this, but hurricanes are counterclockwise. So that means the most dangerous place is between 3 o'clock and 12 o'clock. Throwing a breaking ball. And the eye came in right on the river. And so the whole northeastern quarter came in on Mississippi. And don't get me wrong, this is a terrible thing for Louisiana. They had all kinds of problems, but it was utter obliteration on the coast. They wouldn't let me fly down on the day of the storm because of the winds and all that. Flew down the next morning, landed, got in a helicopter, flew from the Mississippi to Louisiana line back to the Alabama line. It was utteral blood rush. It looked like the hand of God had wiped away the coast. We had about 60,000 houses in the area that was uninhabitable. We had one little town, 6,500 people, Waveland, that there was not an inhabitable structure left in Waveland. It was the town closest to the eye of the storm. But I flew over that thing from one state line to the other and back. And I can't tell you how how bad it was. One of the biggest surprises of My life was when all was said and done, we had 238 fatalities, and a third of them won on the coast. The storm had hurricane force winds 250 miles up into Mississippi. Uh two-thirds of our state had just incredible problems. Jackson is 150 miles from the coast, and it was just trees down, houses down, people getting killed. Somebody that believes in planning and getting their act together. Tuesday, I got back, I met with my staff on Wednesday, and I told them we're gonna have three priorities. First priority is to rebuild. Second priority is to clean up. One thing you learn is you can't rebuild till you clean up. But the last thing is we gotta get our schools back open. If you don't get your schools back open, their parents are not gonna go send their kids to Birmingham and stay in Gulfport. And the superintendent of schools, who was super, about a week after the storm said, Governor, I got an announcement I think we ought to make. And I said, Well, what, Hank? He said, We'll have every school in Mississippi back open by November 1st. I said, that's pretty bold. He said, Well, I think we could do it. I said, if you think you do it, say it. So he stood up and said it and in the press conference. We did it. We had two press conferences a day for the first three weeks and then one a day every week. But on November the 1st, every public school in Mississippi was open except one, and that one wasn't open because it's trailers from the federal government that they're gonna put classrooms in were a few days late. But the attitude of people my mom used to say catastrophe and calamity don't create character, they reveal character. Was that repeated over and over and over and over again in Mississippi by Mississippians? But also, we had 960,000 people who came to Mississippi in the first five years to volunteer. And that's 960,000 whose names got captured by some church or some organization. I'm sure there were more than that, but it brought out the best. I can remember Santa Barbara, California, they would bring a bus out once a year. They did it for all five years. And a lot of people on the bus were the same people who had been before because they felt like I'm doing something that I ought to do.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

So speaking of bringing the best out of the best of people, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna fast forward from Katrina to where we are in the present day, in terms of our politics, how we as Americans interact with each other, how Democrats and Republicans interact with each other. I want to start in terms of advocacy, or the advocacy part, the lobbying part. You opened up your own shop as a lobbyist, or it was just you, your Rolodex, and a phone, I'm sure. No computers, no cell phones, and it was all face-to-face. From your perspective, what have you seen in terms of the changes of advocacy from where you are? And does advocacy back when you first started the tactics still apply today?

SPEAKER_01 26:24

When I started the firm in 87, it was just me. I rented an office from one of my friends' offices. I had even had my old office, and I didn't have my old secretary, I'm the UC secretary. And uh signed up two clients the first month, a farming operation, and believe it or not, a labor union. One of my policies when I first started was because I didn't live here and we had half cell phones, I would always associate somebody to help me with that client. You know, somebody like Don Fierce, uh, who was one of my best friends, and but people that that were good lobbyists and wanted to help on the climb, and I made $200,000 the first year. I thought I'd get a Rockefeller. I had started out practicing law at home part-time and lobbied up here part-time after about two years, I figured out I could make more money lobbying in Washington than I could practice law. Yeah, as you see in Mississippi. My business grew. It was mostly except for the the maritime engineers, it was mostly Republican, it was mostly big business, and it was changed differently. We didn't have a public relations often. The lobbying fern would go outside and hire somebody if they needed to. And uh secondly, it was very much more congenial. You know, Tommy Boggs, one of the premier Democrat lobbyists, and his mama and daddy were both congressmen from Louisiana Democrats. We were just very good friends, competitors, but friends. We finally opened a restaurant together. We had 20 Republican lobbyists, 20 Democrat lobbyists, and 10 business guys. We had 50 owners, and Boggs and I were the guys who ran it. And you know, there was the idea that we fight during the day, but after five o'clock, we'd go have a drink and have dinner. It reminded me actually as I think about it. My first trip to Washington in 1968, I think I mentioned that my granddaddy was close to Senator Eastwim, his second son, my uncle. I was going to Washington for something, uh first time I'd ever been to Washington. And he said, go by Senator Eishwang's office. He's gonna be wanting to see you. So I went by about 2.30, and that he was on the floor or something, as Chief Staff said, Come back at 5.30. So I came back at 5.30, and the chief of staff throws open the double doors in the center's private office, and sitting next to him at his desk is Teddy Kennedy. I thought to myself, Ward, what would people in Mississippi think if they saw Jim Eastalin and Teddy Kennedy sitting up here together? And two Republicans, Roman Ruska and Carl Curris, and then Senator Talmud from Georgia. Three Democrats, two Republicans. They were the most congenial, they liked each other. The Senator introduced me, each one of them, and told me to sit down. And I sat down, I sat there for 45 minutes and they talked about family, they talked about football, they talked about going to church again. But the main thing that came through to me was if you like somebody, it's a hell of a lot easier to get together on something that's contentious. Because Eastland was very, very conservative. But Eastland knew how to make a deal. Right. And so did Kennedy.

SPEAKER_00 31:17

Do you think we'll get back to that? Or are those days long?

SPEAKER_01 31:22

Well, I hope probably we'll get back to it.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

What's the lesson that you would impart on folks who are in the advocacy field? At least try to get back to those days without selling out their client or anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

You know, one of the things I preach here at the firm is when you go to your first meeting with somebody, your job is to get invited back. So if you act like a jerk andor act like you're smarter, or act like somebody's or something, you don't get back. If you get invited back, you can give them information they don't have. You can tell them other people that they should talk to. Lobbying is complicated, but it's always been complicated because the law is complicated, and the lobbying exists so that the public, private sector has a way to try to influence the members of Congress. That's what it was put in the Constitution for. And one of the things that makes that so much harder today is social media. And look, I have friends who went to college with me, they're smart as a whip, been hugely successful, and they'll send me a social media story that is no more true than the man in the moon. And they're smart people. The geopolitics is bad enough, but when you get the news media that is trying to play to their audience, you know, CNN, CNBC. Makes things a lot more complicated. It really does. It makes it harder because Fox News, it's not one party versus the other. Both parties do it. And I remember when I was a boy and Walter Cronkite was on TV and he. And I always thought he was kind of kept liberal. And today God, I'll in the for what I give to have but Walter Cronkite back or David Brinkley. But there's nothing there preventing the social media, including that by the paid media, to write things that are slanted. To not try to find out the truth. Maybe it's better. I guarantee you there are 50 people in Congress up there today whose idea is, let me say the most outrageous thing about this issue that could be said, and I'll get on TV. If we got back more toward the 1960s relationship between Teddy Kennedy and Jim Eastman were almost the far officers, but there's something about friendship and uh willingness to work together, understanding that if you could get some people on the other side to work with you, that it improves your chances. A lot of state legislators still understand that. When I was governor, the speaker of the House of Democratic course had fought in the hardest on tort reform. But when the hurricane came, he told me, whatever you think we need to do, we will do it. And I will not let the House stop you. And he bragged after two or three years after the storm that the House of Representatives did not appropriate one dollar of the federal money that we received, $26.5 billion. They did not try because they realized I and my administration were very close to Cochran, chairman's appropriation, very close to Locke, former Republican leader, very close to George Bush. I'll tell you a great story that's got a tie to this. November 1st, I came up of 2005 to present our plan to the press, Mississippi's plan. Went to the White House, had a good meeting, had some things we had to work out. But uh Bush tried to help. Some of his staff wanted to not set bad precedents. But we worked through that. I got over to the house side and I got off the elevator, and I hear somebody say, Hey, Haley, Haley, I'll look over. Bonnie Frank. And I'd never met him, but one time we were on a TV show, at least one of the most liberal people in the Congress. And he said, I heard Mississippi's got a plan. I said, Yes, sir. I've just been to the White House and presented it to the president. And he said to me, if you'll give me a copy of your plan, I will send it out to every Democrat House member, and I will put a letter with them to them that says, This is Mississippi's plan. I'm going to vote for it, and I wish you would too. Now, why would the most little guy tell a conservative Republican because he knew the people in his state wanted to help. They knew it was the worst disaster. They wanted the federal governor to do. It reminded me of an old saying from Ronald Reagan in politics and no such thing as permanent enemies. If you're lucky, you got some permanent friends. But your permanent enemy may be the guy that saves you when you drown it.

SPEAKER_00 37:41

Well, governor, this has been fantastic. I could sit here for hours and hear the stories about your career and your governorship and what you're doing now. But it's really an honor and a pleasure to have you on this podcast. And uh we thank you very much. It's an honor. Thank you, Kiefer. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you.