Haley Barbour doesn’t want to have to deal with dissent on the Senate floor. Neither does Hilary, Biden, Michelle Obama, Chuck Hagel or John Kerry. None of these people would want to deal with any pushback at all.
Barbour ran for the Senate way back in 1982, which featured one of the widest disparities in age between incumbent and challenger (even more so than McDaniel-Cochran). This time as the GOP challenger to a still-sharp John Stennis, then 81, Stennis told the people of Mississippi not to send a boy (Barbour, who just turned 35 about 2 weeks before the election) to do a man’s job. It would be 21 years before Barbour recovered from that humiliation to run for office again there.