Barbour’s Defense of GOP Fund-Raising Is a Scalding Offense

It was a blend of down-home wit and inside-the-Beltway guile that took Haley Barbour and the Republican Party he led to the top of the national political heap.

And Barbour, the GOP national chairman when the party took control of Congress in the 1994 elections, brought his formidable gifts to bear Thursday as he occupied the spotlight at Senate committee hearings on campaign finance abuses.

Facing the most severe personal test of his career--his appearance earned the hearings a rare moment of live television coverage on CNN--Barbour came on strong. That was not surprising, considering the stakes--he was defending not only his own reputation but that of the party to which he has committed most of his adult life.

Democrats had hoped to make the 49-year-old lawyer-lobbyist into Exhibit A in making their case that, when it comes to campaign law violations, “the other guys do it too.” But Barbour refused to play the role of passive target assigned to him, and his 30-minute opening statement left the Democratic strategy in shreds.

“This is and should be a bipartisan investigation,” the native Mississippian declared. “But it is not a bipartisan scandal,” he added, flatly rejecting Democratic claims that the GOP shares the blame for the fund-raising excesses that sparked the hearings.

More than just mounting a vigorous defense, Barbour carried the battle to the opposition, finding ways to gibe at Democratic senators. He particularly targeted John Glenn of Ohio, the committee’s ranking minority member.

No fewer than three times Barber brought up Glenn’s involvement in the scandal involving Charles H. Keating Jr., a large campaign contributor in the 1980s who sought the intervention of those who benefited from his generosity when federal officials investigated his savings and loan operations.

While Glenn, who is still angered by the charges made against him in the Keating affair, visibly smoldered, Barbour told him: “I understand very well the resentment that boiled up in you . . . but I’m going to do my best to keep my own outrage under control.”

In denying any illegality by the National Policy Forum, the GOP think tank he headed and which Democrats claim served as a conduit for illegal foreign contributions into the GOP’s 1994 congressional campaign, Barbour likened the group to the Democratic Leadership Council, a Democratic think tank. He pointedly noted that Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, another committee member, chairs that organization.

And demonstrating a combination of legal and verbal dexterity, Barbour contended that he considered a loan guarantee made for the policy forum by the domestic subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based corporation--the financial transaction at the core of allegations of GOP fund-raising improprieties--to be not only a legal but “a political plus--lagniappe.”

This, Barbour explained, is a Creole term that means “a little something extra.”

But whatever idiom Barbour chose to adopt in the witness chair, Republicans could hardly hope for a more seasoned champion.

He cut his political teeth as a field worker in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and then steadily rose until he reached the White House as Ronald Reagan’s political director. After the Reagan administration, Barbour’s political connections paid off during his subsequent stint as a Washington lobbyist on behalf of big-ticket corporate clients.

Then, when George Bush’s presidential defeat created a vacuum within the GOP leadership, Barbour took the helm of the national committee. He bemoaned the stridency of the party’s ’92 national convention--”We sounded like puritans looking for witches to burn”--but also warned against compromising fundamental conservative principles by cutting deals with the Democrats. He derided that custom as “like paying the cannibals to eat you last.”

But the major achievement of Barbour’s chairmanship was to sense President Clinton’s weakness early in his first term. As the 1994 midterm elections approached, Democratic candidates were running from the president “like scalded dogs,” Barbour rejoiced. That insight led him to pour extra millions of dollars into that year’s battle against the Democrats.

“When the dice are hot, you got to bet the ranch,” Barbour explained to GOP activists, a theory that many believe played no small part in helping the Republicans win control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

The Democrats set out to prove this week that part of the GOP congressional campaign kitty came from abroad through the National Policy Forum and was therefore illegal.

But on Thursday, they got no help in that regard from Haley Barbour.