{"id":382,"date":"2011-04-26T22:17:05","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T02:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=382"},"modified":"2011-04-26T22:17:05","modified_gmt":"2011-04-27T02:17:05","slug":"haley-barbours-religion-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/haley-barbours-religion-problem.html","title":{"rendered":"Haley Barbour’s religion problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

So why has Mississipi Governor Haley Barbour, Establishment Republican Supremo, decided to drop out of the GOP presidential sweepstakes? Here’s Dan Baltz’s explanation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

His decision not to enter the contest, he said in a statement, grew out of his conclusion that he lacked the necessary fire in the belly. But friends of Barbour, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share insight about his decision, said he had come to the conclusion that Republicans can win only if they are totally focused on serious issues and not distracted by some of the side issues, such as Obama’s birthplace, that have arisen in the early going.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Push that just a sentence further and you get: And he realized that the only way he could win the nomination was by campaigning on the side issues–ick.<\/p>\n

Actually, for guys like Barbour, the side issues include things like abortion and gay marriage. Take a look at Charles Reagan Wilson’s account<\/a> of his 2007 reelection race, where he was discombobulated by a Democrat who ran a Jesus-laced throw-the-money-changers-out-of-the-temple campaign. Barbour’s a throwback to the days of the Southern Bourbons, and make that bourbon and branch: The joke in Mississippi during a stint of budget cutting was that the only state account not to feel the knife was the governor’s mansion Maker’s Mark line item.<\/p>\n

Forget about the lobbying for big tobacco and the ill-considered comments on race. What gave Barbour the vapors was the prospect of going around Iowa pastor to pastor testifying to his born-again experience. My guess is that his pal, Indiana Governor Mitch “Social Values Truce<\/a>” Daniels, suffers from the same condition. Going back to George H.W. Bush, Establishment Republicans have had to tug the forelock before the evangelical elite if they want the nomination. Ick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So why has Mississipi Governor Haley Barbour, Establishment Republican Supremo, decided to drop out of the GOP presidential sweepstakes? Here’s Dan Baltz’s explanation: His decision not to enter the contest, he said in a statement, grew out of his conclusion that he lacked the necessary fire in the belly. But friends of Barbour, speaking on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nHaley Barbour's religion problem - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/haley-barbours-religion-problem.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Haley Barbour's religion problem - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So why has Mississipi Governor Haley Barbour, Establishment Republican Supremo, decided to drop out of the GOP presidential sweepstakes? 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":384,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}