Bill Minor: Barbour machine showing wear

Political columnist Bill Minor is back this week with another hard hitting look at the Barbour administration. The once invincible Haley Barbour machine is as Bill put it "showing wear". Haley has enjoyed control of all three branches of government for all practical purposes. Billy McCoy has been the Democrats only hope of holding the governor at bay on key issues, and has taken a lot of heat for it. The governor has tried unsuccessfully to remove Speaker McCoy from his position.

Haley Barbour tried to rig the Nov. 4 election ballot to help his in-trouble Republican U.S. Senate candidate and surprisingly got kicked in the teeth by an 8-l vote of state Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, from most news stories that came out of the Supreme Court’s Sept. 18 action, many Mississippians could well have missed what happened. In terms of Mississippi political history and governance, what the Supreme Court did was monumental.

First and foremost, it opened the first real crack in Barbour’s unprecedented control of virtually all three branches of Mississippi’s government. Certainly it represented a rebellion by the state’s highest judicial body, which seemed dominated 7-2 by Barbour.

Minor then pivots from the ballot dispute to the issue of transparency regarding the disbursement of Katrina funds. Haley used his close ties to the White House to secure money for Mississippi,while at the same time playing along with their "Louisiana does not have their act together line." As we have learned since 2005, the White House lead by Karl Rove saw the hurricane as a political opportunity to remove the Democratic governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco.

Of the $11.5 billion in housing recovery Community Development Block Grants appropriated by Congress, Mississippi had gotten $5.2 billion and Louisiana $6.3 billion, even though Louisiana’s home loss was three times Mississippi’s.

As Fentress points out, rarely after Katrina did Barbour miss an opportunity to make Louisiana look bad “with references to Mississippi’s self-reliance and refusal to whine, a slap at New Orleanians trapped in the flood.”

Fentress, who lives part time in New Orleans, with the help of a former Associated Press Capitol correspondent, secured an interview with Louisiana ex-Gov. Kathleen Blanco and learned that Blanco was resentful of how a neighboring governor portrayed her state’s heartbreaking dilemma.

“I always thought that was a very racial statement,” Blanco said of Barbour’s denigration of the New Orleans’ Katrina disaster, which hit the city’s poor African-American population hardest. Also, Blanco decried what she called “politicization of this disaster” by Barbour’s favoritism as a one-time adviser to George Bush.

When I went to the Katrina round table discussion in Denver, I was shocked to learn how angry Louisiana was at Haley Barbour. They felt that he had used his connections to make himself look good, while putting them down, which made it even harder for them to get the money they needed. They were very angry over the prospect of the port project in Mississippi, which they said was designed to steal Louisiana's commerce before they could back on their feet. Louisiana was focusing its federal money on housing, which is what it was intended for. Barbour had commandeered the federal money for Mississippi to use at his discretion. Where did the money go?

“I really thought the vision would be a great vision like the governor said it would be,” said Duany. “The chance to prepare for the 21st century, which perhaps was the only gift of the hurricane, has been squandered by an utter lack of vision at the state and regional level.”

Outside of lifting the Coast casinos out of water onto land to better ride out hurricanes and keep the slots clanging, many Coast community groups viewing the largely barren Mississippi Gulf front are asking: Where is all the recovery Barbour promised to get re-elected?