FOB’S LAST HURRAH?

Ungainly reporters tagging behind, Fob navigates the tightly quartered tables, rattling iced-tea tumblers and poling his doughy mien over patrons’ plates without so much as a hairnet between his rake-over and their fried okra.

“I’m runnin’ fo’ guv’nah,” he interrupts, “and I sho’ would appreciate yo’vote.”

“You got your work cut out for you, guv,'” says one ornery diner, not knowing the half of it.

Six months ago, it was believed that James would beat Democratic lieutenant governor Don Siegelman like the family pinata, coasting to reelection as other Republican incumbent governors are expected to do this November. But while Siegelman socked away $ 3.5 million, the notoriously mulish James refused to raise money, or to salve the silk-stocking Republicans who’ve taken offense at his firebrand social conservatism, or even to declare his candidacy before the state chairman publicly denounced him.

One can hardly blame Fob — he’s had a busy term. Three years ago, James raised his national profile by reprising prison chain-gangs after a 30-year hiatus. Two years ago, he took on the American Civil Liberties Union in defense of the Ten Commandments and Judge Roy Moore: He informed the heathen chiggers that if they planned on wrenching the Decalogue off Moore’s courtroom wall, they’d be doing so over the brittle cadavers of the National Guard, the state troopers, and the Alabama and Auburn football teams.

Over the last year, Fob has joined with the teachers of DeKalb County who are battling a federal district court injunction against school-sponsored prayer (he’s dubbed the district’s court-imposed prayer monitor “the secret police”). The governor is using the DeKalb skirmish to make war on the last six decades of Supreme Court church/state rulings. Stop by his office in Montgomery, as I did last December, and you’ll be treated to a 45-minute slide show on judicial usurpation and original intent.

Such extracurricular activities, of course, have made Fob aces with the Bubba vote. And he approaches rock-star status with the national Christian Right — Ralph Reed is his campaign manager. But economic conservatives in the state feel these tangential endeavors have diverted Fob’s attention, not to mention reflected poorly on their New South refinement. For that and many other reasons, Fob found himself in the middle of a contentious five-candidate primary. On June 2, he just missed the requisite majority, finishing first with 48 percent. So now, in a June 30 runoff, he’ll face the business community’s candidate, Winton Blount III — Republican stalwart, construction/auto dealer magnate, millionaire, and son of “Red” Blount, Nixon’s postmaster general.

The runoff looks to be a squeaker; Ralph Reed acknowledges that it will be close, and even the pros aren’t laying wagers on the outcome. Complicating matters is that Alabama Republicans have open primaries, allowing Democrats to make crossover mischief in the runoff. While the Siegelman camp is feigning neutrality, Blount’s campaign, with a formidable ground game and active outreach to black voters, is undoubtedly wooing Democrats.

Fob and Blount are both devoutly religious conservatives (essential in a state where even the Democrats have a “director of faith outreach”), yet they offer a total contrast in styles. Fob loves to hunt Canadian geese with his dog Elijah, a yellow lab that resides on a pillow in his office. “He’s a hell of a dog — writes all my legislation,” Fob says. Talk to Blount, and there’s no time for levity, but he says he’ll make time to “hunt for industry.” At a Blount press conference, they serve vegetable trays and quiche puffs. At a Fob press conference, they serve Lay’s potato chips and jelly donuts.

“Winton Blount may be Masterpiece Theater, but fob James is Hee Haw,” explains David Azbell, Fob’s deputy press secretary. “And I will guaran-damn-tee yuh that the ratings for Hee Haw are ten times those for Masterpiece Theater.”

By Alabama standards, this year’s campaign acrimony seems mild — which is a bit like saying by Louisiana standards, the candidates seem principled. In past years, if you were running for office, opponents would disclose your homosexuality, your wife’s alcoholism, and your daughter’s carnal misadventures.

Now, Blount says Fob lacks “vision” and is failing to lead. Fob says “Ms. Shirley MacLaine has visions,” while he has a longstanding no-new-taxes pledge, which Blount rebuffs. Blount staffers claim voters are being telephoned by “pollsters” who speak in Ebonics and hint that Blount writes bad checks. Fob staffers meanwhile produce tapes of Blount workers engaging in negative “push polls”; and they say their “Alabama Needs More Fob!” signs are being defaced by interlopers who keep inserting “No” between “Needs” and “More.” Fob calls the Blount campaign “crazy” and “cowardly.” Blount calls Fob “desperate” and a “walking, talking hypocrite.”

But the most heinous obloquy came when Blount resurfaced one of Fob’s finest moments. (There are many to choose from. There was the time Fob enraged editorial boards by encouraging teachers to give students a “pop on the fanny” like the one he earned for blowing up a toilet with a bullfrog firecracker. Or the time he enraged editorial boards by suggesting state employees should emulate the “blinding efficiency” of the Waffle House, where he frequently dines.)

The incident in question took place in 1995, when Fob mocked evolution to the state board of education, telling them they “might ought to have a look at Genesis to get the whole story.” He then bent at the waist, slumped his torso, and dragged his arms like an ape to illustrate the Darwinian absurdity. Blount, echoing the sentiments of many image-conscious Alabamians, opined that Alabama didn’t need a governor “dancing around the stage like a monkey.” Fob, a former barbell manufacturer, retorted, “If I dance like a monkey, then he must dance like a fat monkey. I’m a monkey that’s in good shape. . . . I’m also not a monkey whose daddy has put $ 2.5 million in my campaign either.” Lest anyone think Fob was disparaging corpulent primate scions generally, his wife Bobbie clarified the intended target, calling Blount “a big, fat sissy.” (As a fine Christian woman, Bobbie later apologized. As an honest Christian man, Blount finally admitted he was “baldheaded and portly.”)

Entertaining though it is, all this internecine spilling of blood and treasure is enough to give Montgomery mayor and Fob campaign chairman Emory Folmar an ulcer. Folmar, it should be noted, does not have a weak stomach. He has said his office is “no place for sissies or weaklings,” and he proves it by drawing a Beretta 92F out of his desk drawer for show and tell, just in case an irate constituent overruns his lovely assistant, Ruby.

But even America’s most heavily armed mayor has a bit of trouble keeping Fob on the reservation. Unable to persuade Fob to fund-raise last winter, Folmar now says the campaign will be flat broke by runoff time (though national GOP and evangelical money will be forthcoming if they win). Both Reed and Folmar have encouraged Fob to drop the school-prayer talk from his ads, reckoning that Fob has more than solidified that base. Instead, they emphasize his tax pledge, his education gains, his unimpeachable record on crime, and his surprisingly good economic record. (Blount types say Fob is a detriment to attracting industry, but Alabama leads the nation in start-up businesses and, like the rest of the country, is enjoying record-low unemployment. “Even a blind hog finds an acorn,” retorts Blount.)

Fob has pretty much read from the same hymnal, except in April, when he filed a defiant writ of mandamus with the U.S. Supreme Court begging relief in the school-prayer case. In the same brief, he questioned the constitutionality of the court’s prayer decisions by comparing them to Darius the Mede throwing an intercessory Daniel into the lion’s den. It was hardly the first such Fob manifesto, but Folmar didn’t find out about it until he read it in the papers.

Fob, it seems, is not the keenest listener. Even dear friends, like state senator Jabo Waggoner, say, “When he wants your opinion, he’ll give it to you.” Fob, in fact, has forged a career of being unpredictable and of alienating almost every constituency. A lifelong Republican, he switched parties to run for governor in then yellow-dog country, succeeding George Wallace in 1979. But he was the only Democratic governor who didn’t endorse Jimmy Carter. And he took special pains to barnstorm for Reagan’s economic recovery plan.

Vowing not to serve more than one term, he returned as a Republican in 1995 and was looked upon as a messiah by the “Big Mules” of Alabama business, who hoped to cap jury awards in a state known as “Tort Hell.” Since the beginning of his term, Fob has sent tort-reform packages to the legislature, only to see them routinely impaled by the Don Siegelman-controlled Senate. The Senate Judiciary Committee is so trial-lawyer infested that during last session’s “deliberations” on Fob’s doomed tort-reform bill, a sign on the committee-room door read, “Quiet please, funeral in progress.”

Establishment Republicans resent Fob’s inability to work with the legislature (which he punishes by calling special sessions). And to compound the ill will, Fob appointed Jere Beasley — the state’s best-known trial lawyer, who Republicans swear carries a pitchfork in his satchel — to the Auburn board of trustees. After that Fobian prank to tweak Democratic senators who wouldn’t hear of any candidate but their own, Fob raised Republican ire again when he hired Beasley’s law partner as his executive secretary. More recently, Fob even offended some of his fundamentalist base, saying that a “moment of silence” bill wasn’t worth the “damn paper it’s printed on” and won’t “require sh–until you get relief from the U.S. Congress.”

Fob’s hijinks, along with his constitutional crusades, have seen him branded an embarrassment to the state by everybody from the Birmingham News to the New York Times’s Howell Raines. But Fob isn’t worried. “I don’t know who Howard Raines is,” he shrugs. Nor does he seem terribly troubled that every major state paper has endorsed Blount, as has every other Republican candidate and several of his own exstaffers.

And maybe he shouldn’t be. There’s one old hand who thinks Fob James will win: George Wallace. I am delivered to Wallace’s Montgomery home by David Azbell, who is anxious to turn the Wallace endorsement into a press release on the principle that “if Gov. James burps, and it’s a really good burp, we make sure he gets credit for being the best burper in the state of Alabama.”

Like displays in a museum, the contents of Wallace’s house are perfectly preserved and nearly obsolete. His couch patterns look not to have been changed since his stand in the schoolhouse door. We file past his grip’n’grin scrapbooks, his Slim Whitman albums, and the oil painting of his late wife, Lurleen, tilted against a blank wall in an unused room. Bedridden since 1996, the paralyzed Wallace has Parkinson’s, in addition to which his mattress vibrates automatically to stave off bedsores. He’s so hard of hearing a computer is parked by his side so inquiries can be typed. His room’s aquamarine paint job would match his hospital gown, were the latter not caked with ashes from his Garcia y Vega Gran Premio habit.

It is difficult to believe this spectral specimen once exemplified a whole strain of politician endemic to the region where Fob now scarfs down waffles at a table for one. Unregenerate segregationists or feisty liberals, these populists practiced politics not as poll-tested automatons, but as entertainers who incited and amused, delivering hell-for-leather philippics in perfectly turned phrases. They were obstinate and gregarious and unpredictable and fierce, elicting every known human response except boredom.

Though Wallace is barely able to whisper on account of fatigue, I ask him if, when Fob goes, so goes forever the breed of southern governor who was part statesman, part jester, part pugilist. Wallace looks away from his ESPN2 toward a yellowed picture of himself with a puggish snarl, when he was a Golden Gloves champ pounding the sphenoidal sinus out of some unfortunate opponent. He draws up his chin, puts down his cigar, spits a Gran Premio globule on his gown, and nods in the affirmative.

But Fob’s not finished yet. Back at Niki’s in Birmingham, I am seated at the governor’s table as he hunches over his barbecue chicken platter. I ask Fob if he regrets the Blount/monkey crack. He looks down at his plate, swabs his chicken runoff with a biscuit, then looks up with contrition. “I called Winton a fat monkey, and I was in errah,” he says, suppressing a grin. “What I should have called him was a big monkey.”

Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.