As the wacky, high-profile Senate race in Alabama heats up with one top candidate’s release of a new TV ad, another major contender, former Auburn University head football coach Tommy Tuberville, is proving to be just another mud-slinging politician.
Predictably, Tuberville proves it in the very campaign literature that repeatedly proclaims he is not a typical career politician. The unintentional self-parody is almost priceless.
The first lines of his Dec. 5 fundraising mailer blast fellow candidate Jeff Sessions as a “career politician.” It continues: “One thing I am not is a career politician. In fact, I got in this race because I was tired of weak-kneed career politicians not following through on promises to Alabamans. That’s the difference between Jeff Sessions and me.”
The rest of the letter makes Tuberville a candidate for Clichés Anonymous. Four times he stresses that he supports President Trump, thrice more he rails against career or “professional” politicians, six times he blasts the Washington “swamp” that must be drained of its “creatures.” He also fulminates against the “deep state” and the “rigged” and “sham” impeachment “witch hunt” while accusing Sessions of “cashing in on decades of D.C. favors and insider money!” (Yes, the exclamation point was his, not mine.)
And it all surrounds a bullet-pointed series of attacks on Sessions, at least two of which contain refutable falsehoods. All of which predicates Tuberville repeatedly asking for donations of up to $2,800 for each stage of the election.
The ridiculous mailer fits well, though, in this nearly comic operetta with March 3 primary elections now less than two months away.
The Senate seat is held by Democrat Doug Jones, whose election in this conservative state was seen as a fluke result of an alleged ephebophilia scandal surrounding Republican nominee Roy Moore. Moore is back for another try for the Republican nomination. He is very poorly funded but has a history in prior Republican primaries of outperforming his preelection polling. Sessions, the former attorney general who was first the favorite and then the whipping boy of President Trump, is trying to win back the seat he held for 20 years. Then there is Tuberville, making his first political run after decades of intermittent coaching success, and fourth-term U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne.
Polls have Sessions well ahead, with Tuberville comfortably in second, and Byrne a distant third. Byrne, an otherwise good man and impressive congressman, has been pilloried by statewide media for his sudden and frenetic switch this summer from a sober legislative craftsman into a histrionic caricature of a Trump-loving deplorable. Perhaps finally seeing that inauthenticity doesn’t sell, Byrne changed his tone on Monday as he released the race’s first TV ad of the new year. Somber and serious while talking about Byrne’s late brother who served for two years in Kuwait and Iraq following Sept. 11, the ad takes aim at radical congresswomen and athletes “attacking America.”
Byrne has plenty of money for the race and will need to spend every bit of it wisely to catch Tuberville for the second spot in an expected Republican runoff election with Sessions.
It is the substance-less Tuberville, though, who has openly embraced the darker arts of campaigning. As a veteran recruiter of college athletes, Tuberville is a first-class schmoozer with an engaging manner. In a football-mad state where his name identification is substantial, those skills have been enough to vault him past Byrne in the polls. Still, he’s looking up at Sessions, who’s apparently well ahead of Tuberville in ID, support, and cash, and so the coach is willing to jettison his aw-shucks nice-guy-ism and try throwing punches. His campaign literature, though, swings rather wildly at the personally likable Sessions.
So Tuberville claims not to be a politician while running a political race, talking like a politician, and shaking the money tree like a politician. Maybe that will help him move the ball down the field, but it looks to me like a sure-to-fail Hail Mary pass.
