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Alabama, Despite History of Unruly Politics, Has 'Never Seen Anything Like This'
New York Times 8h ago
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Donald Trump rallies for Roy Moore, repeats falsehoods in Pensacola speech
Fact Check PolitiFact Dec 8, 2017
MONTGOMERY,
Ala. — “I don’t think you can compare this one with anything,” said
Bill Baxley, 76, whose first foray into Alabama state politics was as
attorney general nearly five decades ago.
“I
haven’t seen in my lifetime — a long time, I’m 83 going on 84 — one
this unique,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, who was first elected to
the State Legislature in 1970 and is now the dean of the Alabama
congressional delegation.
“Never
seen anything like this,” said Glen Browder, 74, a former congressman,
during whose political career different Alabama governors were convicted
of bribery, brought down by sex scandal and indicted on a charge of stealing money to buy fancy shower stalls and a riding lawn mower.
The
special Senate election here, to be decided Tuesday, has made for one
wild and ugly campaign season. It was never going to be afternoon tea,
but with the airing of allegations in November that Roy S. Moore, the
Republican nominee, had hounded and molested teenage girls when he was
in his 30s, the race tightened — and the dialogue went south.
Mr.
Moore has gone about creating a real-life political science experiment,
testing whether last year’s presidential campaign was an anomaly or
whether voters remain just as willing to shrug off truth-stretching,
multiple charges of sexual misconduct and incendiary speech.
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While
Republicans in Washington have fruitlessly sought any way to exorcise
Mr. Moore from the race, alarmed that he would imperil their narrow
Senate majority, their nominee has all but laughed at his own party.
In the last few months, he has implied that the liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros was going to hell, warned in a tweet
of “Democrat operatives” who are “REGISTERING THOUSANDS OF FELONS” —
with a link to a story that pictured a pair of black men with paperwork —
and told an African-American attendee at one of his events that America
was last great when families were intact during the slavery era. That
follows claims he made in previous years that Muslims should not be
allowed to hold office and that President Barack Obama was not born in
the United States.
When Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, appeared at a rally for Mr. Moore near the Gulf Coast last week, Mr. Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, tweeted:
“We don’t need an outside agitator like Steve Bannon carpetbagging in
Alabama,” invoking loaded phrases from the civil rights movement and
Reconstruction in a single sentence.
“They’re
pulling out all the old classics for this one,” said Gordon Harvey, a
history professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama.
While
Mr. Jones has not said anything nearly as incendiary as Mr. Moore has,
he has attempted some political jujitsu amid the campaign’s racial
politics, sending out a mailer featuring an African-American that read:
“Think if a black man went after high school girls anyone would try to
make him a senator?”
No,
Mr. Browder said, he had simply never seen so many volatile elements
packed into a political moment. Then he thought for a minute.
“I see parallels with one,” he said. “George Wallace.”
Wallace,
the fiery segregationist governor, comes up often here these days. He
was by turns an avid boxer, a circuit judge with lofty ambitions, a
state leader who blatantly flouted federal authority, a symbol of
defiance to the direction of the national culture, a hero to many rural
and small-town whites and a politician who ran national campaigns on a
promise to “send them a message” — all descriptions that perfectly fit
Mr. Moore.
Mr.
Wallace was a Democrat, and his use of race was far more overt and
central. Yet when political veterans are pushed to come up with
analogous races, they often turn to Wallace’s successful 1970 run for
governor, where he took on, as a national newspaper column put it, “an
unholy coalition of the Republican and Democratic national parties,
militant blacks and country club millionaires, the White House and
Alabama liberals.” Aside from the White House, at least since President Trump endorsed his candidacy, this is much the same crowd that Mr. Moore has taken on.
Still,
those who knew Wallace well are quick to point out that the messages
may be delivered in much the same style, but the messengers are not so
alike.
“There’s
a major difference,” said former Gov. Jim Folsom, a Democrat whose
father, the two-term governor “Big Jim” Folsom, was a mentor to a young
Wallace.
The
elder Folsom elevated an Alabama tradition of tub-thumping economic
populism in a state dominated for much of its history by a coterie of
wealthy planters and industrialists, known as the Big Mules. While
Folsom railed against the elite-owned “lyin’ newspapers,” much like Mr.
Moore and right-wing populists today, he championed women and blacks
along with poor whites.
Wallace
followed Folsom’s lead until he discovered that a moderate line on race
had become a liability in Alabama electoral politics — and then
switched to become a fire-breathing segregationist.
“The
major difference,” Mr. Folsom said, “is that Roy Moore, good or bad or
whatever you think, has always been genuine in his positions.”
While
Wallace championed a brand of patriotism attuned to the grievances of
angry whites, Mr. Moore’s positions — that, for instance, the United
States might be “the focus of evil” in the world because it allows
same-sex marriage — show someone dialed in more to fervent evangelicals
than the broader conservative electorate.
“Wallace
certainly was willing to use the school prayer issue, but by and large
he never mentioned the fact he was a lifelong Methodist, never mentioned
his faith on the stump,” said Dan T. Carter, a historian who wrote one
of the leading Wallace biographies.
Since the first women accused Mr. Moore of misconduct in The Washington Post,
Mr. Moore has kept a light schedule and largely avoided interaction
with the news media, a strategy that would have never occurred to
Wallace, who relished the political fray and would gleefully joust with
out-of-town reporters.
Still, what the two may have most in common are their fans and their enemies.
“When
you look at his followers,” said John Knight, a black Alabama state
representative who grew up in segregated Montgomery, “they’re the same
people that were energized by Wallace.”
The same people are outraged, too.
Upper-class,
typically Republican neighborhoods “where the rich folks live in the
suburbs up across the mountain from Birmingham,” as Wallace described
the enclave of Mountain Brook during that epic 1970 race, are now
crowded with white “Doug Jones for Senate” signs. To talk to many
residents of these neighborhoods is to inevitably find two attitudes:
assurances that they will be voting for Mr. Jones and a fatalistic
certitude that, of course, Mr. Moore will win.
Thomas
T. Gallion III, a Montgomery lawyer whose father was the state’s
attorney general, voiced the often unstated perspective of Alabama’s
elite as to why Mr. Moore was viable.
“The rest of the state is in a time warp,” he said. “They never progressed out of the ’50s. They don’t think. It’s sad.”
Yet
as with Alabama populist campaigns past, Moore backers are most eager
to remind voters how many forces outside the state are pulling for Mr.
Jones.
It
is “the language that works,” Mr. Carter said. “If you can tag somebody
an outsider, you’re two-thirds of the way there in Alabama.”
This
is an age-old Southern populist tactic, added Mickey Griffin, a real
estate executive who was the political director on Wallace’s 1972 and
1976 presidential bids.
“It
goes back to the Civil War, it goes back to Reconstruction,” he said.
“The big thing down here is that folks feel like the rest of the country
is making fun of them.”
Mr.
Griffin does not see Mr. Moore as “anywhere close to being a George
Wallace,” but he sees him trying to make the same appeal to a fighting
instinct and umbrage at being looked down upon.
In
the midst of a two-hour phone conversation about the Wallace era and
the current campaign, Mr. Griffin got a call from a friend on the other
line. “What do you think about Roy Moore?” he asked, and then laughed at
the response. “‘He’s an embarrassment to the state of Alabama following
in a long line of embarrassments,’” Mr. Griffin reported the friend as
saying. “‘But he’s our son of a bitch, and I’m voting for him.’”
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