Just weeks after suggesting that slavery "didn't matter for diddly," Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour similarly tried and failed to whitewash the massive BP oil spill threatening the entire Gulf Coast. After telling an audience a week ago that "A bunch of liberal elites were hoping this would be the Three Mile Island of offshore drilling," Barbour changed his tune as the black tar balls began washing ashore in his state yesterday. That, he now insists, "was a wakeup call for us."
After seeing first hand the first deposits from a two-mile oil slick reaching Petit Bois Island, Governor Barbour during a press conference Wednesday asked BP and the White House to put more boats off the Mississippi coast. "Now is the time that we've got to project them farther out, use more of them," he said, adding, "The more vessels we have out there the more likely is we'll find this miles off the barrier islands rather than some of it comes to shore."

That's a far cry from the recent grandstanding by oil industry lobbyist turned governor. Two weeks ago, Barbour and his wife filmed a tourism promotion ad funded by BP announcing, "The Mississippi Gulf Coast is open for business." And just days after proudly declaring, "There is no sheen, oil, (or) emulsified oil within about 75 miles of Mississippi," Barbour last week told CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

"But we haven't had, really, any impact. I mean, we haven't had enough oil hit Mississippi's beaches to fill up a milk jug. Now, we're prepared and we're prepared for the worst. But thus far, we haven't had any kind of incursion, except the news coverage is killing our tourist business. Everybody thinks that the Gulf Coast all the way around is ankle deep in oil. And, of course, it's not."

As for BP, Governor Barbour told Blitzer he had nothing but praise, "I'm not going to complain," he concluded after announcing:

"BP has never said no to any requests we have made. Now, some requests we've made they haven't been able to perform. But they have never said no."

Alas, that was then and this is now. As McClatchy summed it up, "Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's oil-leak message appears to have changed from 'nothing to worry about here folks' to 'we've had a wakeup call.'" In another change to his talking points:

On Wednesday, for the first time, Barbour made it through an entire press conference in Gulfport without saying people should come on down and enjoy beaches, golfing, fishing and seafood.

Apparently, that's one stain on Mississippi that Haley Barbour is finally willing to acknowledge.
UPDATE: As ThinkProgress notes, Haley Barbour isn't done defending the industry by any stretch. barbour pooh-poohed the growing dangers of the spill to Gulf Coast habitat, claiming, "Once it gets to this stage, it's not poisonous. But if a small animal got coated enough with it, it could smother it. But if you got enough toothpaste on you, you couldn't breathe."