Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions campaigns for his old U.S. Senate seat from Alabama with the style of a grad student defending his dissertation to a faculty committee. Unlike most politicians today, he seems earnestly to be trying to prove that his theses all cohere, connecting intellectual dots rather than appealing to the voters’ inner ids.
In an invite-only meeting on Wednesday in his home city of Mobile with about 10 people — in these days of the coronavirus, small meetings are usually the only sort allowable — Sessions made his case for Trumpian policies in a most un-Trumpian fashion. He speaks deliberately, pausing to come up with just the right word or argument, almost as if running his thoughts through an internal filter to ensure they are relevant, defensible, honorable, and true.
He started by making the pitch his TV commercials hadn’t, namely that his proven ability to represent Alabama’s interests vastly exceeds that of his Republican primary opponent, former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville. Ticking off the names of military installations in the state Tuberville probably hasn’t even heard of, Sessions explained that his long service on the Senate Armed Services Committee has helped ensure Alabama’s bases are an integral part of the Pentagon’s mix.
He also made the crucial case — again, this is a man for whom philosophical cohesiveness is important — that those bases serve the national interest, rather than being just local pork. Alabama voters, he said, have values beyond mere parochialism.
“They would like their senator to play a positive role in those [national issues], too,” he said.
And that’s when he was off and running — or, rather, striding purposefully, with careful attention to his path — into his now-familiar litany of how overly free trade and overly open borders harm the working man. He delivers the message not as Trumpian red meat, though, but as part of a didactic narrative, replete with historical references perfectly on point even if unfamiliar to most modern audiences. Sessions wouldn’t win many votes at a mass rally by citing diplomat George Kennan’s once-famous “Long Telegram” in 1946 outlining a strategy of “containment” against the Soviet Union, but by gosh, he says that idea is similar to how we need to treat China now, and people should understand there is good precedent for his ideas.
“I’m betting on America,” he said of the battle of wills with China, but “we need our Sputnik moment,” something to galvanize attention and focused effort the way the NASA space program rose to meet the Soviet orbital challenge. “China actually has a lot more to lose than we do.”
This may all be well and good, but how can it beat Tuberville’s aw-shucks recruiting pitches about draining the swamp and President Trump supporting him because, well, he’s a football coach, and everyone knows football coaches are tough? After all, the polls all say Tuberville’s ahead, and the polls are never wrong, are they?
A young lady in attendance suggested the answer. With the riots and the virus and a sense of national crisis, she told Sessions, “People are worried.” They may get to the voting booth and decide they want proven, steady, well-grounded leadership, rather than a glib glad-hander after all.
Sessions just nodded assent, almost as if he’s too modest to put it in exactly those terms himself. Modest, but determined. There’s sort of a Cool Hand Luke quality to Sessions, who, for 35 years, has proved that others from Ted Kennedy to Trump can throw punch after punch at him — like actor George Kennedy’s character in the movie — only to see him, like Paul Newman’s character, somehow still standing, on his legs and on his principles.
(“The physical presence of Paul Newman is the reason this movie works,” wrote reviewer Roger Ebert. “The smile, the innocent blue eyes, the lack of strutting.” Ebert could just as well be describing Sessions.)
The next day, 500 top Alabama military veterans endorsed Sessions. They join some two dozen sheriffs and district attorneys, most with political organizations of their own. It will be a low-turnout election, but Sessions has a “ground game” the football coach himself can’t match.
Good ground games sometimes lead to winning touchdowns.
