“Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s (R) press office sends emails of news clippings that have recently included jokes about former Attorney General Janet Reno’s gender and the tsunami that hit Japan, Ben Smith reports.

‘The off-color jokes, circulated inside and outside of Barbour’s government office, underscore questions about whether the governor is ready for the intensity of scrutiny that will come with leaving the relatively forgiving world of Mississippi politics.’” — Political Wire

Look, let’s just dispense with this stuff. Barbour is exactly who we think he is. If the press is going to get outraged every time he tells an off-color joke or waxes nostalgic for the Mississippi during the days of his pappy, this is going to be a long year. With Barbour, we know exactly what we’re getting. The best thing for the media to do would be to either treat Barbour as a Mike Gravel-style joke candidate and mock him endlessly, or to just ignore him. He will go away if they do. (Personally, for myself, I choose Option A.)

I always thought the Wall Street Journal's artistic renderings of newsmakers were silly. This, more than most, is.

With that in mind, I’m not sure what the media’s doing with respect to Barbour. It seems clear to me that Barbour has little chance of getting the Republican nomination, let alone winning the White House. Barbour’s first-tier status seems entirely attributable to his having a hefty list of D.C. contacts. His national candidacy is a media-driven farce. The media does not ignore the negative tidbits about segregation and the like, but they don’t seem to persuade people like Smith to just ignore Barbour completely. The battle over Barbour’s candidacy seems to be taking place entirely within the media at this point–Democrats see him as about as much of a threat as Palin, and the polls suggest Republicans lack any interest in him. So, one might ask, where is this demand for Barbour-related news coming from? The only people who seem sincerely interested in Barbour info (I don’t count myself as sincerely interested) are people in the media, but the only stories that seem to get out there are ones that paint him in a terrible light. That’s right, even the only sector that’s remotely interested in the guy as a candidate is deeply ambivalent about him. I’m quite sure the rest of the country will follow their lead.

My heuristic for whether a candidate is serious is this: can you picture thousands of people spending days doing phone banks, knocking down doors and making big financial sacrifices to see that this person gets their party’s nomination to be president? So far as I can tell, in the South, those people are Palin and Huckabee, not Barbour. Barbour seems to me to be this year’s John Connally-style candidate, this year’s super-funded guy who just goes nowhere. Unless it’s The Donald instead.