Dem Victory In Alabama Race Arose From Decade Of GOP Corruption

The national media have missed for the most part how voter reaction against Alabama’s corrupt Republican rule helped Democrat Doug Jones defeat the GOP U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore on Dec. 12 in the state’s special election.

Recent financial and sex scandals at the highest levels of all three branches of government in Alabama helped prepare voters to defeat Moore by 49-48 margin last week. Republican Jeff Sessions had won that seat with 97 percent of the vote unopposed by Democrats in 2014 before vacating it this year upon his appointment as U.S. attorney general.

It’s true also that Jones (shown at right) and his campaign team orchestrated a masterful strategy to generate high turnout against Moore, a religious zealot with a scandalous past.

But Moore would not have been so vulnerable in the overwhelmingly Republican state if previous Alabama scandals and the dubious performance of the new Trump administration had not softened GOP support even amongst those who normally trust righteous-sounding candidates. 

Moore’s predatory activities followed a decade of scandals by others. One led to the resignation of Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley this year in a mind-boggling sex scandal. Also, House Speaker Mike Hubbard, the state’s most powerful legislator during recent years, received a four-year prison term last year for massive corruption, as reported here.

Bentley’s scandal included several aspects that are particularly relevant to the Jones-Moore senate race. For one, Bentley’s longtime claim to have been a religiously inspired “family values” Republican was destroyed by massive coverage of his affair with his married staffer, Rebekah Caldwell Mason. She is shown at center with the governor (at left) and the state’s ALEA public safety director, Stephen Collier, whom the governor fired to prevent exposure and who responded with litigation.

Our Justice Integrity Project has developed deep sources in Alabama and has reported on many of these scandals and their cover-ups. One overview was our 2016 column How To Understand Political Sex Scandal Allegations.

In Alabama, the state’s one-party governance — created in part by a political prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman, the state’s leading Democrat — weakened accountability from civic leaders and their institutions, as we have reported.

The harm? Corruption involving sex, bribery, dishonest law enforcement and/or national security contracts (all covert factors in the Siegelman case, like many others) often causes blackmail and huge rip-offs of federal taxpayers, as well as other harms to third-party victims.

Therefore, the analysis below carries importance beyond a critique of missed news angles or journalism failures.

As the nation’s attorney general, for example, Jeff Sessions (shown at left) is deeply involved in selection of federal judges and prosecutors. His long track record as a Senate committee chairman and Alabama attorney general and federal prosecutor is well worth examining — particularly in light of longtime rumors implicating him in the kinds of sinister abuses prevalent elsewhere in the state’s higherarchy.

Under the evocative title Harvard Political Review, The Alabamafication of America, Alabama native Drew Pendergrass wrote earlier this year in the Harvard Political Review that “The current worries about Trump’s irresponsible governing style are similar to concerns Alabama commentators have been expressing about their often-demagogic leaders since before the 1940s. To understand the Trump administration….we should look to Alabama, and the reasons why the state government is teetering toward collapse.”

Media Myopia

In my experience, the major media in Alabama and elsewhere (except for tabloid or blog outlets) have until recently minimized scandal involving VIPs, in part because the major outlets are themselves owned and run by VIPs. They have instead featured disputes over partisan politics and such “Identity Politics” issues as divisions based on racial, sexual, religious and regional differences.

Whether from ignorance, bias or unwarrented bliss, therefore, the national media for the most part have skipped Alabama’s pervasive culture of corruption in explaining Moore’s loss.

Difficult as it is to target an ostensibly religious man on suspected sexual misconduct, it is even more difficult for most mainstream journalists to suggest in the corporate-controlled media that more pervasive patterns of scandal exists. 

The Washington Post set the tone for the senate race’s coverage by reporting on Nov. 9 (in Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32) that Moore had targeted teens for romantic attention when he was a state prosecutor in his early 30s. The reporting was conducted by Stephanie McCrummen, Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites. .

One credible victim was Leigh Corfman, who said that when she was aged 14 Moore persuaded her to accompany him home from a courthouse and then join him in stripping to underwear and, she said, touching his genitals.

She is shown at age 14 at top left of the adjoining collage portraying Moore’s accusers. The charges helped generate unusually strong opposition to Moore, including from three of Alabama’s largest (and jointedly owned) newspapers. One was the Birmingham News, the state’s largest but also one that, like the other two, is published in print only three days a week because of financial and circulation cutbacks.

National reporters and pundits have noted that Moore’s claims that his religioous interpretations of the Bible are more important than legal precedent has twice caused his removal from his previous job as the elected chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court. Some news reports show also that Moore and his wife Kayla led a religious foundation that secretly paid him nearly one million dollars despite his claim through the years that he worked for the foundation on a volunteer basis.