Alabama leadership is a weird stack of crap right now, and it’s exactly what the state wanted.
Untangling the Bentley sex scandal, which Alabama built by doing its best to be its worst.
Last week, Alabama’s governor did a stupid thing, terribly.
He called a press conference to address an audio recording, steadily flowing into the ears of the state press, in which he talks over the phone with his closest advisor — a woman who is paid off the state books, and another man’s wife — about a sexual encounter between the two. The governor told the state’s press that, yes, he had said inappropriate things about having sex to his advisor, but he had never actually had sex with her. He maintained this despite having taken “full responsibility” a moment earlier for a recording in which he discusses possibly moving his assistant’s desk away from his office door so she wouldn’t hear fucking. He did not sway.
Robert Bentley trotted out the most obvious bullshit he could find, and for reasons not wholly clear, he had sculpted it into the shape of a horse. But by God, he was going to saddle up that pony and ride it as far as it would go.
Which was not very far. Bentley faced a state press eager to capture the precise impression of the asshole he is after months of rumors about the affair. Jutting from the face of the bullshit pony was an obvious scenario much more disturbing than Bentley and a staff member enjoying a chat about sex they’d already had: that when the leader and the face of the people of Alabama had talked with his advisor about sauntering up behind her and placing his hands on her breasts, he was delivering unwanted sexual advances on a married underling.
When confronted on this possibility by a reporter, Bentley halted. No more flags directing you to look at the uncanny pony made of bovine manure. No flashing neon begging you, desperately urging you to buy it. The governor tilted his chin down and quietly answered, “No,” the call was consensual.
And then the lights flashed once more, the wind machine gushed outwards again, and Bentley waved his arms back and forth toward the bullshit horse’s general direction, before some flack said that the governor would only take one more question, as if in any reality remotely resembling this one, that was true, or fair.
It was inherently bad craft, whether you take the craft at play to be messaging through a crisis self-built from frayed wires and unquenchable id, or rambling along as another useless shitheel in a suit.
Because why would you build a fake horse out of bullshit? Bullshit comes from a bull, not a horse. Why not build a bull out of bullshit? Then again, why would you do that either?
Because it is not just what Alabama voters get from their leaders, it’s what they want. Just look at their work.
Should Bentley exit the Governor’s Mansion one way or the other, behind him is a lieutenant governor whose most meaningful accomplishment in state politics is nearly murdering by neglect the state’s prepaid college tuition program, the monitoring of which was really her previous elected office’s only tangible job. Two slots down the line is the Speaker of the State House of Representatives, a Republican party boss whose corruption charges probably led to the uncorking of the Bentley affair after the firing of the head of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, Spencer Collier. Collier disclosed details of the affair to the press around his firing, which he alleges was for disobeying the governor’s order that he commit a crime and not provide an affidavit related to the Speaker’s trial.
Per Collier, Rebekah Caldwell Mason — the object of the governor’s affections and, at one point, nearly half a million of his campaign donors’ dollars — is the state’s de facto governor. If so, she has not been a very good one.
During this administration, the first term of which Mason served in a communications post, Bentley delivered encouraging bon mots to the state, like telling its non-Christians, essentially, “Y’all all going to Hell when you die!” a few days into office. For the last two years, Alabama has been on the precipice of full budget collapse, and may yet still degrade into meaninglessness its Medicaid program, which provides meaningful healthcare to a fifth of the state’s population. All the while, Bentley has been useless, mocked, ignored.
On the upside, Alabama’s getting what it’s paying for: Bentley has never taken a salary based on a campaign promise not to do so until the state crawled back to full employment after the Great Recession. (The governor’s website amusingly promises that he is “getting closer to receiving a paycheck.” There should be a little chart!) On the downside, Bentley’s inner circle just got an 80 percent raise. And those are not the ones who have been overcompensated through private sources. Apparently like Mason.
Mason’s husband also is a TV weatherman and church contemporary of Bentley who Bentley tapped to run the state’s Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives — because why the fuck not?
Bentley, like the dilapidated mass of political leadership that might climb if he falls, ascended to his present position in 2010. That was the year the Republican Party finally and officially absorbed state government, taking the opportunity given to them when the Alabama Democratic Party died smoking in bed in 2007.*
*This may not be how you remember it happening. You may even believe to have seen a Democratic Party puttering about and losing elections in Alabama the past few years. But trust me, it burned to death after drifting off while smoking Virginia Slims and watching Mama’s Family on a motel TV. It was a Red Roof Inn, even. It’s better for them this way.
The 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary curdled on the state electorate’s worst instincts: the frontrunner, noted dadlyfe technocrat Bradley Byrne, was buried by primary voters after leaking that he might not believe everything in the Bible — even pictures drawn by a child on the inside cover — and an implication he might split a Coke with the concept of evolution if it offered.
The Bentley campaign seized upon this anathema of possible reason. Prior to the gubernatorial race, Bentley was a Tuscaloosa dermatologist who managed to become a House benchwarmer. (Prior to office, the alleged de facto governor worked in outdoor advertisements, marketed for a community college and local government, and occupied as news director at a glorified public-access channel owned by the University of Alabama.) Surprising with a second-place finish in the primary election, Bentley overtook Byrne in the runoff via the supporters of the third-place candidate, a shit-cloud posing as a shitty former governor’s son who traded on brain-dead and inaccurate xenophobia about people who ain’t what talk that good-talkin’ Alabama English ‘fore drivin’ cars. To his credit, Bentley’s campaign outdid Byrne by leaning on the no-salary bit and the fact that he’s a doctor, going so far as to change his legal name to “Dr” to try and weave around ballot rules that prohibited in-booth marketing of the characteristic that made him most appealing to voters.
If that last sentence reads anything like praise, it’s not. There are two easily lost truths about election-year politics that particularly apply in The South. One is that a stupid, base thing is not subtracted of its baseness or stupidity just because it shakes folks to vote some way. The other is that campaign strategists deserve nothing but the tallest, longest wanking motion your little arms can manage when they get lucky and do something stupid and base that gets someone elected.
And there has been so very much to wank toward when it comes to Alabama’s voters. Two years after electing Bentley, they plopped Roy fucking Moore back on the state’s highest bench — the job he was yanked from once for not following the law due to the coiled temptations of his giant Ten Commandments paperweight fetish. He was back just in time to have a rapt audience for his weird, anti-gay constitutional fanfic about how probate judges should not follow the law.
You don’t have to search around much to read something apologetic to those same Alabama voters about Bentley, as if an administration so cripplingly unqualified feasibly could have worked. Or you may hear that it’s not right a gubernatorial scandal is happening to these voters, again. Or that they didn’t ask for this. (Although, for minority voters in the state, that might actually be true.)
You’ll hear more things of that note in the coming days, especially if a confirmed ethics investigation or potential corruption investigation finds anything like that supposed Alabama Sex Plane, or more comes of a report that Bentley sicced state law enforcement to gather dirt on the men who first wrote about the affair. (One of those men blogged last year on his own family’s efforts to have him declared incapacitated to appoint a guardian or conservator. Great alleged use of state resources there, Dr. Dr. Governor Dr.)
But as the Montgomery Advertiser’s Josh Moon wrote last week, you can complain only so much about those no-good politicians doing cheap and stupid things in Alabama without wondering why the cheapest, stupidest things always seem to work. After a bit, you can’t keep apologizing to voters for their own shit running down their knees.
You could saunter up to the socioeconomic excuses, point to the manipulations of the betters noted in the theses of The Mind of the South or that weird, novel version of it by Harper Lee that got published last year. But Alabama always has been built on the problems of serf politics, and in this year of the disaffected, full-of-shit white voter, it’s important to note that life being real goddamned tough ain’t new.
College graduates have been fleeing over the borders and never coming back for a long time. The state’s only effective-ish economic policy for two decades has been to toss billions at foreign industry to import high-skilled workers from somewhere else. Shitty, low-paying jobs are what the state always has had because it has never installed the education base to have anything more.
A reasonable person could surmise, then, that those problems might not get fixed if you only vote for people whose chief talent is showing their ass. And yet Alabama’s electoral decision-making preferences remain lodged somewhere between those of a fundamentalist Christian suicide cultist and those of a parent who picks up his bawling kids an hour late after school and complains to them that they just don’t understand how important it is that he buys the right pack of smokes.
Governing requires being responsible for everything, everywhere, and everybody, all at once, while being looked toward to move the whole enterprise a step ahead. There’s really no need to apologize to Alabama voters that they don’t get that out of their leaders. There clearly is a distinct difference between governing and whatever the hell it is they want.
So why do you trot out a fake horse made of bullshit? Why does a termed-out, seventysomething governor, with only credibility to gain five years into the job, deny having extramarital sex so unconvincingly, so indelicately it makes him look like a sexual predator? How could the senior advisor with whom he had those sultry recorded conversations be so ghastly — in the state that birthed and denied Lily Ledbetter — to charge that the only reason this is a big deal is because of sexism?
Because being a fuck-up, and being a stupid asshole when called on it, is one of those traditional Alabama values.
Which include not conservatism, but radical sloth.
Not fiscal responsibility, but starving yourself so nobody else can eat.
Not standing up for true and old-fashioned morals, but reserving the right to clutch your pearls when you ain’t bragging about how hard you fucked the night before.
When those are the ragged starting points you take into the voting booth, you do get what you asked for.
You get everyone you’ve put in charge being terrible at their jobs, even the shitheels in suits.
You get bullshit stacked in a bizarre shape you’re told is acceptable.
You get the smell that swallows your breath.
