(Haley Barbour)
OXFORD, Miss. - What a gathering it was two years ago when Terry McAuliffe
got together with his buddies Bill Clinton and Haley Barbour in Horn Lake,
Miss., to celebrate the plant opening of GreenTech, a then-McAuliffe-led
producer of battery-charged automobiles.
The three pols had a high-old time, lots of non-partisan
backslapping, guffaws, a few off-color jokes, and general glee at the
prospect of flowing cash that GreenTech offered.
McAuliff, the former national Democratic Party chair and now
governor of Virginia, loved hanging out with his mentor and benefactor, former
President Clinton, and his old sparring pal Barbour, former national Republican
Party chair and governor of Mississippi.
After all, Barbour was key to GreenTech’s securing of $5
million in loans from Mississippi taxpayers plus the usual treasure chest of
tax exemptions. And who but Clinton lays greater claim to the school of what New York Times Magazine writer Mark
Leibovich called “Green Party” politics in his July 2012 article about the
gathering?
McAuliffe, Clinton and Barbour are quintessential members of
the “Washington Political Class,” Leibovich
wrote, “a vast and self-perpetuating network of friendships and expedient
associations that transcend even the fiercest ideological differences. … One
quaint maxim of the Political Class is that there is no such thing as Democrats
and Republicans in Washington, only the Green Party. Green as in money, not
GreenTech, or anything to do with clean energy.”
In other words, they are the very essence of what a growing
number of Americans despise, even if people don’t always connect their anger
and frustration to media darlings like McAuliffe, Clinton and Barbour.
It’s one reason why record numbers of voters, particularly
Democrats, simply stayed home this past election day. What was their choice here in
Mississippi? Incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, Barbour’s premier
benefactor in Washington’s money politics? Challenger Travis Childers, who signed
the immigrant-hating, white-supremacist Federation for American Immigration
Reform’s pledge of no “amnesty” for hard-working-tax-paying-but-undocumented migrant
workers?
Both parties are so beholden to Wall Street and billionaire
financiers that Main Street voters would simply rather watch reruns of
“Gunsmoke” on election day. At least in Dodge City, Marshal Dillon (look him
up, young readers) takes care of business, and the bad guys get their just
deserts.
With the Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate in this
month’s election, Cochran is in line to resume again the chairmanship of the
powerful Senate Appropriations Committee with all its promise of more taxpayer-financed
pork for Mississippi. Tea Partyers, still smarting over the loss of Chris
McDaniel in Mississippi’s Republican primary, hate Cochran’s pork-barreling
prowess. They do raise an interesting question:
Why, after all those years of Cochran, the late U.S. Sen.
John Stennis, D-Miss., and U.S. Rep. Jamie Whitten, D-Miss., chairing their
respective Appropriations committees in Congress, is Mississippi still the
nation’s poorest state? More than one of every five Mississippians live in
poverty. Roughly the same number never finished high school. One of every four
lacks health insurance. Why hasn’t all our pork-barrel done something about
those statistics?
Maybe the story of GreenTech sheds some light.
Terry McAuliffe says he no longer has anything to do with
the company. He resigned as company chairman five months after that
backslapping party with Clinton and Barbour in Horn Lake. Not long after, the
federal government launched an investigation into the firm and another outfit,
Gulf Coast Funds Management LLC, in connection with the granting of permanent visas
to major foreign investors. Production at the Mississippi plant was delayed,
and the firm still faces penalties if it hasn’t hired 350 workers and invested
$60 million by the end of December.
Barbour’s involvement with GreenTech is reminiscent of his
“Port of the Future” deal on the Gulf Coast, where he recruited his friend Thad
Cochran to help maneuver a redirection of $570 million in federal funds that
had been targeted for Hurricane Katrina victims needing affordable housing. The
funds’ new direction? An expansion of the Port of Gulfport that Barbour touted
as the “Port of the Future”. The project has foundered ever since amid delays
and shrunken promises.
The journalist Michael Kinsley once had this to say about
Haley Barbour: “He manages to send the message: This is all a big game—a big
wonderful game.”
Well, Haley Barbour and the rest of the Washington Political
Class, it’s not a game to us folks out here in the hinterlands. The economy is still a scary thing on Main
Street. Too many people still lack health insurance. The migrant workers who
make such great campaign fodder for Democrats like Travis Childers and
Republicans like Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant only came here because of
bi-partisan trade agreements that cost them their livelihood back home.
Put Marshal Dillon on
the ballot next time, and maybe people will show up.
This column appeared recently in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.