Jeff Sessions is a class act.
The former U.S. attorney general lost big in his political comeback attempt for the U.S. Senate from Alabama, but he never lost his moorings, his principles, or his dignity.
At the exact moment the polls were closing, before the results were known, Sessions sat down with me for 15 minutes. Before I could ask a single question, he had some things he wanted to say.
Basically, it was a litany of Sessions’s by-now-familiar advocacy of restrictive immigration policies and a policy of targeted tariffs rather than purely free trade. The way he lays it out, it’s as if he is still trying to persuade people, to win the debate — and also to show that his positions are well-thought-out and coherent. It was a disquisition, not a series of tag lines.
Also, though, it was a paean to what he sees as the common sense of the majority of Americans. He says he is sure they believe as he does.
“The American people are right,” he said. “They have concluded that massive immigration does not serve the national interest. They believe a trade policy that rejects any tariffs no matter how great the provocation from competing nations does not protect American manufacturing and jobs. They believe China is a particularly dangerous competitor and even a strategic threat. They also think we’ve been too quick to deploy our military forces around the globe in order to further the ideal vision of a democratic world — and it hasn’t worked.”
And so on. One may not agree with all of this — I certainly have at least partially different views — but the sense Sessions gives is of a man thoroughly earnest, thoroughly convinced his ideas are right for the United States. And, as he noted, these are indeed his ideas, ones he was pushing as a lonely voice in the Senate for more than a decade before Donald Trump ran for office. Win or lose, Sessions was not going to stop spreading his message, and he gave the sense that his winning or losing was of less importance than that the message be understood and that policy reflect those values.
As Sessions finally paused for breath, I put forth the two questions I had come there to ask.
I asked about his fallout with Trump — not about the familiar dispute about whether Sessions should have recused himself from the Russia investigation, but if, in retrospect, he thought there might have been some way he could have communicated that decision to the president in a way that helped Trump understand that the recusal was both legally necessary and actually politically helpful to Trump himself.
Sessions wouldn’t go there. I asked the question several ways, but he merely repeated that he did what the law required and that his internal discussions with Trump, or even hypotheticals about what might have been, should remain private. This, for him, is a matter of a fierce, proud, old-style code of personal ethics.
“I did work hard to rigorously serve the president,” Sessions said. “I am a big critic of former top officials who rush out and write books and spread private conversations they remember or maybe misremember. Or maybe they misunderstood what the president meant in private conversation. It is easy to undermine a president by taking private conversations out of context … Honor and loyalty to the man who appointed you is required, and you should take care not to undermine the duly elected president as he goes about his constitutional duties.”
And that was all he would say about that.
Finally, I asked, since he didn’t know the outcome yet, how did he feel about this wild ride he has so famously been on, going from the most popular official in Alabama to the first, bold endorser of Trump, to a man trying to make a huge comeback after that very same Trump denounced him at every turn despite Sessions’s own continuing loyalty to the administration?
Answered Sessions: “I have not had a problem recognizing that the people are going to make a choice, and they owe me nothing. Nothing! They are making a choice about who they want to do the job in the future.”
He said that the combination of the heat of summer (an unusual time for an election in Alabama) and the coronavirus made it “very, very hard to communicate.”
Still, he said, “The last couple of weeks, I have been very satisfied that people around the state have shown their support, and I know we have advanced in the last few weeks, and that has been gratifying.”
He paused, and then added:
“And as to my personal feelings, I have eight of my 10 grandchildren here tonight, and I am at peace about the whole thing.”
