Republican leaders giddy over the excitement their presidential nomination free-for-all is starting to generate yesterday heard Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour call them gently back to earth.
“We’ve become a top-down party after being in power for so long — that’s why it’s so rare for any party in America to extend its hold on the presidency for more than eight years,” said Mr. Barbour, a second-term governor and former Republican national chairman during President Clinton’s time in the White House.
“We have to become a bottom-up party again,” Mr. Barbour said at a Capital Hilton luncheon address on the last day of the Republican National Committee’s annual winter meeting.
Not having to operate under the heel of a Republican president and his strategists, Mr. Barbour was a unifying force as chairman. He grew to be the most respected — and missed — former chairman in recent memory, party leaders from several states said yesterday.
“This is the year we have to maximize grass-roots participation and rebuild our strong donor base — right now the Democrats are doing it better than us,” he told the state GOP chairmen and men and women who make up the 168-member RNC.
He said the state party leaders and other Republicans have grown used to ideas being handed down to them by somebody in the federal bureaucracy or in the Republican White House itself over the past seven years.
“We forgot” how to develop ideas ourselves and pass them up the ladder, which the GOP state leaders have to relearn, he said. “Ideas matter, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher agreed.”
The last time Democrats occupied the Oval Office for more than eight years was the Roosevelt-Truman period that ended in 1952, and for the Republicans it was the Reagan-Bush era that ended in 1992.
Mr. Barbour avoided even hinting at a favorite among “any of the five people who might” win the GOP nomination, but he did say he could support any one of them with enthusiasm.
To the delight of his partisan audience, he aimed a few vintage Barbour-style barbs, in this case at the Democratic nomination threesome: New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.
“I was worried that it was bad for us that Hillary seemed to be running in the center and Obama is to the left of that,” he said. “But everybody knows how liberal she is [and] Edwards is running to the left of Mao Tse-tung.”
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