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?

The Politicization of Katrina by Karl Rove

The more and more I find out about the inner workings of the Bush administration, the more I want to see some jail terms handed out. Hat Tip to our friends at the Daily Kingfish for their post on this Monday.

There is a new book out titled "Machiavelli's Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove". Salon has a nice article containing an excerpt from the book. You can read the Salon piece here: "How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned"

The first evidence of Rove's involvement in the Katrina disaster occurred on Tuesday afternoon. "Rove understood what a nightmare this was for the president," Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana says, "so he went into high gear on the spin thing they're so good at in the White House. Rove had David Vitter, the Republican senator from Louisiana. I was at a press conference and David Vitter walked up to the mike and said, 'I just got off the phone with Karl Rove.' I looked at the governor and she looked at me, like, 'Why is David Vitter on the phone with Karl Rove?' I mean, he could have been talking to generals, the president himself, but Rove is just a political hatchet man."

Remember this is Karl Rove who had an office IN THE WHITE HOUSE, a first (and please never again) for a political advisor. That fact alone provides a glimpse of how the Bush administration used Rove's abilities to politicize everything under the sun. Anything that happened became an opportunity to make Democrats look bad and republicans good. We have NEVER seen this level of politicization.

Instead of supplying relief to the city, Rove had devised a scheme whereby he could blame the failure of government to take action on someone besides Bush. "They looked around," Landrieu says, "and they found a Democratic governor and an African American Democratic mayor who had never held office before in his life before he was mayor of New Orleans -- someone they knew they could manipulate. Ray Nagin had never held public office and here he was the mayor of New Orleans and it was going underwater."

In short, Rove was going to blame Blanco for the failure of the response in Louisiana, and to do that he was going to use Nagin. He had already set the plan in motion on Tuesday with Nagin, who, even though he was a Democrat, was so close to the Republican Party that some members of the African American community in New Orleans called him "Ray Reagan." In 2000, Nagin had actually contributed $2,000 to Bush's campaign when he ran for president.

Rove knew of Nagin's ties to the Republican Party, so more than likely Nagin could be convinced to level his criticism at Blanco and to support Bush when he could. Here was Rove's strategy: Praise Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi; praise Michael Brown and FEMA; blame Blanco, the Democrat. It was not a stretch for Nagin. He and Blanco so disliked each other that in Blanco's last race Nagin had endorsed her opponent.

While thousands of people were stranded in a flooded major U.S. city, all the White House could think about was how to use the catastrophe to their political gain, via Rovian tactics. This is the not the first time this has come up regarding Katrina. Back in January 2007, Michael Brown the former head of FEMA accused the White House of playing partisan politics.

"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, 'We had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,''' he said, without naming names. "'We can't do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley's a white male Republican governor. And we can't do a thing to him. So we're just gonna federalize Louisiana.'''

Brown declined to say who in the White House had argued for federalizing the response only in Louisiana. He said that he'd later learned of the machinations through Blanco's office and from federal officials.

Blanco reacted sharply to Brown's remarks.

"This is exactly what we were living but could not bring ourselves to believe. Karl Rove was playing politics while our people were dying,'' Blanco said through a spokeswoman, referring to Bush's top political strategist. "The federal effort was delayed, and now the public knows why. It's disgusting.''

I truly believe we will see the day when Bush, Rove, and Cheney will have their day in court. We are seeing the groundwork being laid now with the McClellan book, the Iraq reports, etc...