Haley Barbour, the soon to be term-limited governor of Mississippi, is still putting together infrastructure for a presidential campaign. Most recently, he picked Jeb Bush’s long time political adviser and former Mitt Romney operative, Sally Bradshaw.

This is evidence of both  Barbour’s growing ambitions of poor Mitt Romney’s “rats leaving a sinking ship” effect (Mitt is still the favorite to win the nomination, on the basis of sheer inertia, as much as anything else, and he is still favored over Barbour right now).

Barbour’s path to the nomination runs straight through the South, and adding Bradshaw to his team is another sign that his plan is to try and sweep the South (a plan which would be complicated by a Mike Huckabee campaign) and leverage that into frontrunner status.

Caveat lector: I lost an election to Haley Barbour in 2003, when I was working on the Musgrove for Governor campaign and am frankly a little bitter.