Will Alabama Send in a Marine?

No doubt Shelby is a Washington, D.C., fixture. First elected to Congress in 1978, Shelby won his Senate seat in 1986. Now in his fifth term, if reelected he would be 88 at the end of his next. But even in an antiestablishment year, Shelby is no soft target. His voting record is solidly conservative and he dutifully tends his home front. That makes him less vulnerable than other superannuated Republican senators — Richard Lugar, anyone?— who in recent elections have been defeated, or just scared silly, by conservative primary challengers. And then there is the blunt force of the money at Shelby’s disposal: He began the race with $19 million in his campaign coffers, a mind-boggling sum for Alabama, a midsized state with low media costs.

But for all the challenges he faces in taking on Shelby, McConnell isn’t exactly a political neophyte. He was reared in a political household: His parents are Republican activists and his father, Roger, was a GOP state chairman who closely aligned himself with conservative senator Jeff Sessions. (Sessions, though, has endorsed Shelby, which suggests a GEICO ad: If you’re a Republican senator, you endorse your home-state GOP colleague. It’s what you do.)

McConnell learned to campaign in college. At Auburn University he ran for president of a student government dominated by fraternity and sorority members. Though not himself in a frat, McConnell won.

By the time he graduated, McCon-nell was on track to go to law school. Instead, he volunteered for Marine officer-training school. Deployed twice to Iraq, McConnell led a platoon in tough combat near Fallujah in 2006. Their mission: going house to house searching for terrorists and militant fighters.

Retiring as a captain, McConnell returned home to attend University of Alabama law school. That’s where he was when he learned pirates had hijacked the Maersk freighter Alabama (events later dramatized by Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips). Astonished that riff-raff in skiffs could seize a large merchant vessel, McConnell launched a “private maritime security” company, Meridian Global Consulting, deploying former Marines to secure commercial ships in treacherous waters. McConnell did this while studying to be a lawyer and still managed to finish law school a semester early.

The leathernecks who have worked for McConnell’s company show great loyalty to him, even after they leave: “You learn in the military that a good leader takes care of those under his command before taking care of his own needs,” says Nick Pronesti, a former Marine who guarded ships for Meridian before leaving to work for a Mobile manufacturer. “Jonathan does that, always.” Pronesti specifically cited McConnell’s intense focus on employee safety and his diligence in meeting payroll, even when Meridian’s clients were late paying.

McConnell will need that tenacity for what many political analysts consider a foolhardy race against Shelby— and not just because of the incumbent’s $19 million war-chest. Seeking his sixth Senate term, Shelby is as entrenched as he is well-funded.

Shelby’s closest race was his first Senate run in 1986, when he was still a Democrat. He challenged the Republican incumbent, stalwart conservative and Vietnam war hero Jeremiah Denton. It was a horrible year for Republicans, and Shelby squeaked out a win. For eight years Shelby remained a Democrat (back when there were such things as conservative Democrats), at times voting along party lines rather than ideological ones, as with his vote against Robert Bork for the Supreme Court. But the day after Republicans captured Congress in 1994, Shelby switched parties.

Though sometimes disappointing on spending — Shelby savors pork projects; buildings on five separate college campuses are named after him — the senator’s voting record lately has been solidly conservative. He has a 99-percent approval rating from Heritage Action; his lifetime American Conservative Union rating, though, is a less-impressive 76. He’s been known to take lonely conservative stands. Years before the 2008 mortgage meltdown, Shelby was the most outspoken senator calling for reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He was among the 25 senators who rejected the 2008 financial bailouts.

“There are a lot of reasons national conservatives should support me,” Shelby says. “There are a lot of things I can do and will be doing for the conserv-ative cause. I know how it works, and I’ve been part of it. And it is both that I have the experience and that I’m in a position to help carry out [real conservative victories] in a way others can’t.”

Shelby would remain Senate banking chairman if reelected, and he says he would use his committee to “dispense with” the Export-Import Bank once and for all (he has been among its most consistent critics). And he would use banking leverage to torpedo Obama’s Iran deal, reimposing sanctions on the mullahs’ regime.

Now that Shelby finally faces a primary challenge (three other, lower-profile Republicans also are running; on the Democratic side, there are two no-names in the race), Shelby is not shy about spending the campaign cash he has hoarded over the years. On seemingly every TV and radio station Shelby’s ads brag around the clock about him visiting all of Alabama’s 67 counties every single year: He knows the “back roads,” and he “stands up to Obama every single day.”

They are good ads — the first two or three times they air. But their relentless repetition and increasingly cornpone quality are brewing a backlash. Alabama’s most popular political cartoonist, J. D. Crowe, hilariously portrayed Shelby’s ads as a kind of zombie apocalypse. Noting all the idyllic shots of Shelby’s vehicle traversing those “back roads,” statewide political columnist Kyle Whitmire derided it as “the most beautiful commercial for a Ford Explorer you’ve ever seen.”

All that ad spending may be an obvious strength, but it may also suggest a weakness. Mobile County Republican party chairman John Skipper isn’t picking sides in the primary contest, but he says, “To me, Shelby’s aggressiveness with media does indicate that he may be feeling like he’s somewhat vulnerable.”

Still, the ads do convey an essential truth: Shelby, at age 81, maintains his work ethic and isn’t taking reelection for granted.

McConnell, meanwhile, is stumping on all the conservative hot buttons— anti-debt, anti-abortion, anti-immigration, pro-defense — but only in passing, as if he assumes everybody knows where he stands. His recurring theme is one that has had resonance in the broader election this year: “America is in crisis,” and “career politicians” can’t or won’t do anything about it: “I think for the first time in a very long time our country is not safe, and we’ve left future generations bankrupt,” he says. “Career politicians have failed us. We need change agents in Washington, D.C., and Richard Shelby has proven time and time again that he’s not one.”

McConnell is hardly lacking for self-confidence: “I’ve never failed at anything important in my life,” he says quite believably, leaving the impression that he walks the line between overeager ambition and patriotic impatience with Washington’s drift. “I think his military career, his track record, his personality are working well in meeting people and in gaining more support,” says Skipper, the Mobile County chairman. “But I’d rather be in Senator Shelby’s position. The power of incumbency sometimes is all you need.”

Alabama voters right now have a Senate tag-team: One senator, Sessions, takes the bold ideological stands while the other, Shelby, usually votes right while working the insider’s game for the state. The voters now have a choice whether to keep that arrangement or scuttle it with someone eager to clean out entrenched Washington interests, lobby by lobby.

Quin Hillyer is a veteran conservative columnist living in Mobile, Alabama.

This article has been corrected.

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