Parker Griffith can’t lose?

Clearly skittish about his reelection prospects with a (D) next to his name, Parker Griffith seems to think he can’t lose if he crosses the aisle. Griffith’s North Alabama district rejected President Obama resoundingly last November. Gleeful conservative commentators lumped his defection within the trend of House Democrats who have recently announced they won’t face voters again in their conservative, McCain-voting constituencies, where poll numbers for President Obama and his agenda have plummeted. But Griffith offer a unique case, as instructive in the long-term as it may be difficult to draw immediate trends from.

Griffith is not one of those Southern pols with deep roots in the Democratic Party, at least not in elective office. 

Griffith only held his state senate seat for two years – half a full term – before he abandoned it to seek retiring Blue Dog Democratic Rep. Bud Cramer’s well-warmed seat in Washington. Griffith’s only previous run for office was a 2004 bid for mayor of Huntsville. Partisan affiliation was a moot point in that non-partisan contest. Every other Southern party switcher since the post-1994 spate of defections had logged long years as a Democratic office holder, with service both in Washington and in their respective state capitals.

While House Republican leaders may be making hay over physician Griffith denouncing the Democratic health care reform plan, in 2008 the NRCC insinuated that Griffith’s medical credentials were dubious.

Griffith’s narrow win in 2008 was a bitter battle. The Washington Independent’s David Weigel found deep distrust among Alabama conservative activists. Alabama regular Republicans don’t seem that much more welcoming.

And while it is true that this district has never elected a Republican – its rural environs’ enduring Democratic legacy dates back to New Deal TVA projects that turned this once backward region around – it is anchored by Huntsville, whose NASA facility has attracted high tech workers from around the country since the 1960’s. Unlike native Alabamians of that era, for these transplants, voting Republican from time to time was not anathema. In fact, many of those newly-minted Hunstvillians embraced the GOP as the party that advocates for the defense and aerospace industries that have fueled the region’s growth. In Hunstville, they didn’t “all love the ‘guv-nah;'” Madison County didn’t “do all (they) could do.” It was actually one a handful of jurisdictions to forsake legendary Gov. George Wallace in his 1982 gubernatorial swan song.

Republican elected officials are not a curiosity in North Alabama, especially in Madison County.  One of Griffith’s pre-switch Republican challengers, Mo Brooks, is a Madison County Commissioner. Politics1.com’s Alabama page lists three other local Republican office holders weighing a primary challenge to Griffith, post-switch.  So, there is a Republican farm team.  Also, last cycle’s Republican primary was competitive, and about as many Republicans turned out on primary day as did Democrats.

Southern Republicans who have spent years in the trenches building a Republican Party from near-scratch can be leery of seasonal, if seasoned, switchers.  This potential primary is reminiscent of a contest in which post-’94 switcher Rep. Greg Laughlin lost his Republican nomination bid in Texas. Not all local, loyal Republicans embraced Laughlin, the most loyal to Democratic leadership to defect that year. He was challenged by the man who gave him a run in 1994. His refusal to step aside drew an opening for Ron Paul. Paul regained his old seat in the House in 1996 by coming up the middle, thanks to the ample funds solicited from his now-controversial newsletter subscriber list.

So, given this background, it’s quite probable that Parker Griffith can loose, after all.

It might be for the best.  Despite his boilerplate rhetoric denouncing “massive new spending, tax increases, bailouts,” Griffith bragged of having “worked hard to support our space and defense programs.” Since his party switch, Griffith hasn’t been savvy enough to pull down the page advertising his earmarking from his official congressional website. The Club for Growth is now on record: they doubt his commitment to small government. As ideologically stringent as the Club can be, Alabama political history offers profound precedent in this regard.

Back to Wallace: the segregationist governor parlayed his Alabama antics of “standing in the schoolhouse door” into a national profile. In his presidential forays, he was the first figure to illuminate, by instinct, the eventual Reagan Democrat.  He was the self-described troubadour for the beautician, the taxi driver and the “little businessman.” And the rhetoric was of a populist hue when it came to economics. It’s a tradition the carried on by the most recent federal party-switcher from the Heart of Dixie.

Fearful from a spirited primary challenge

from a Birmingham-based Afro-American county commissioner in his previous reelection race, Alabama Sen. Richard C. Shelby crossed the aisle without much fanfare in 1995.  (American Indian Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell’s defection was much more of a shocker.)  But in the George Wallace tradition, Shelby confessed in a recent flattering profile in the Washington Post Style section: “A lot of people…say, ‘Let the market work.’ You can’t let the market work where the market is manipulated to such an extent that it would bring down our economy and half the world.” Further, Shelby boasted, “Even some of my Republican friends say I have a populist, progressive streak…I am not a doctrinaire, anti-government person.”

Shelby’s self-portrait is in line with the very concerns raised by local tea partiers, Alabama Republicans and the Club for Growth. The back and forth between conservative and liberal bloggers over whether Obama will be a detriment in 2010 is less important than looking at Alabama’s 5th in the larger context of shifting Southern politics.

Obama in the White House or not, in North Alabama, Parker Griffith can loose.