Alabama’s Mike Hubbard was the wrong kind of thief.
Throwing the book at the formerly most powerful man in Alabama politics, and the crisis he helped create by being cheap.
“You pay money for that shit?”
Every time, they ask. Same question, same words.
Before I can finish the sentence. Before I can add whatever is predicate to the fact that I own Mike Hubbard’s book. And most critical to my already questionable reputation as a competent decision-maker, before I can explain why.
The answer, unfortunately, is yes. I was researching a book on Alabama politics that never quite got off the ground. I did not live in Alabama anymore, so I could not just reach into an abandoned mall fountain in Opelika or an empty Panera booth in Gardendale or Pelham, where I suppose one could have found gently used copy of the Speaker of the House’s book in the months after its publication. But such is the cost of remaining the type of deep-thinking idiot I am while being away from Alabama. Or about $10 on Amazon.
That question about my investment is justified, however: I could have just bought another book—and one with an even more dad-grade title than Storming the State House.
For partway through Hubbard and co-author David Azbell’s diagnosis of his ascendancy to arguably the most powerful man in Alabama politics, Hubbard gleefully admits he is a thief.
“[Rahm] Emanuel was, and remains, totally clueless about the role he played in our efforts,” Hubbard writes, “but he actually provided the blueprint for the development of Campaign 2010.”
Well, really, it came from Naftali Bendavid. Bendavid, a reporter, is the person who wrote The Thumpin’, which details the strategy that Emanuel, as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, deployed to earn a Democratic majority in Congress in 2006 and the shine that carried him to White House chief of staff and a quiet retirement as shit mayor of a bullet-plagued, sprawl-fucked metropolis.
The vice president of the Alabama Retail Association gifted The Thumpin’ to Hubbard, and Hubbard copied it heavily while overseeing the first Republican takeover of the Alabama Legislature since Reconstruction.
Like Emanuel’s plan in 2006, Hubbard and his staff recruited candidates for 2010 who fit his profile of who he needed to win a district, even if the candidate had never considered running for anything at all. Like Emanuel, Hubbard and his staff schemed ways to taint all Alabama Democrats by associating them with high-profile scandals in the party— which, yeah, that’s basic campaign politics, but let’s go with it for a little bit.
Also like Emanuel—and anyone else who’s managed to win a big election—Hubbard had his every synapse re-patterned as brilliance the moment the last ballot floated out of the box in 2010.
Reveling in that, Hubbard’s hype men made a fairly big deal in the conservative press that he stole his winning ideas from one of the shinier Democratic stars of the aughts. It wasn’t just that he copied the competition like everybody does, it was that Obama’s right-hand man practically gave the election to him. Through a book. That a reporter wrote.
In his own book, Hubbard always struck me as perhaps a bit too proud of that.
Rahm Emanuel is obviously a smart guy, a brilliant political tactician, and an inveterate campaigner. I would not vote for him in a million years . . . [but] I recall the line in the movie Patton when George C. Scott . . . shouts toward the retreating German tank corps, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!”
Perhaps one day I will have the opportunity to personally thank Emanuel for helping me devise the plan to elect our historic Republican legislative majority.
I’m sure it will make him proud.
I have thought about that smug little passage a lot the last few weeks, following along as Hubbard and his coterie watched prosecutors undo the seams on his brilliance in a Lee County courtroom, resulting in Hubbard’s conviction under an ethics law he helped improve.
I thought about it when prosecutors showed how Hubbard suffered business and financial setbacks in the months after his electoral victory, and how he sought financial help through his political connections in conversations that openly mixed his personal needs with his work on Goat Hill.
I thought about it when they recited from easily discoverable email exchanges how Hubbard sought lobbying work while still Speaker of the Goddamned House, in full knowledge of the ethics law—even getting a warning to change course from former Gov. Bob Riley. Again, in writing.
I thought about it when Hubbard's former chief of staff testified that Hubbard told him he had a “100,000 reasons” to help secure a patent for a man who just so happened to be paying Hubbard’s company. Meanwhile, Hubbard testified about mourning a dead friend who not only wasn’t dead, but had been in touch with prosecutors in the days before.
I thought about it because what prosecutors presented looked a lot like the dumb shit Democrats did when they ran Alabama—something that Hubbard also gleefully recounted in that chapter where he brags about lifting from Rahm:
Representative Sue Schmitz, a Democrat from Toney, had been given a job created specifically for her within the state’s two-year college system. She rarely, if ever, showed up for work despite collecting roughly $177,000 in taxpayer-funded salary over three-and-a-half years. Schmitz was convicted on mail fraud and program theft charges and sentenced to a federal prison term.
State Senator E.B. McClain, a prominent African American lawmaker from Birmingham was caught funneling more than $750,000 in taxpayer grants to a community program housed within his district and run by a local minister. Federal authorities found that McClain had personally received about 40 percent of the money in kickbacks from the program. . . .
There was no doubt the Democrats’ long history of corruption and the fact that their legislative leadership consistently killed Republican-sponsored ethics reform proposals would be a central focus during Campaign 2010.
The only difference between Democrats’ schemes and his—such as that you can appreciate such things—is that Hubbard’s seemed a little more blatant, a little more obvious. Cheaper.
Based on his emails, Hubbard seemed to believe he had earned that right, despite the ethical implications, because of his proven genius in 2010. “It’s ironic that I was the ‘architect of putting a pro-business legislature in place yet businesses seem to want to avoid any personal association with me like the plague,” Hubbard wrote a leery board member at the Business Council of Alabama. He later bemoaned that “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Now, doing the cheap thing has a professional appeal. If you associate enough graduate degrees in a glassy conference room, inevitably you will hear of an object called a “wheel,” then a vigorous notation that it has been invented, followed by a sharp suggestion that perhaps this group should not attempt to replicate this invention—for, as noted, it has already occurred. A round of measured nodding will commence.
But being cheap can overlook critical particulars, such as whether the vaunted wheel getting lifted is made of aluminum and rubber or Twizzler wrappers and cat throw-up, and if it has traveled the distance it has only because it didn’t need to carry weight.
For example, what Hubbard appropriated from Rahm was certainly effective in 2006, but the ensuing years have shown it probably carried a whiff of candy and cat puke.
Anger at Republicans for the Iraq War . . . certainly drove many voters’ decisions. What is indisputable is that the 2006 majority proved to be a rickety one. Critics argue that, even where Emanuel’s strategy succeeded in the short term, it undermined the party over time. . . . [M]any Rahm recruits [voted] against important Obama Administration priorities, like economic stimulus, banking reform, and health care. Many are no longer congressmen. Some Democrats now argue that, in the long run, 2006 might have weakened the Party more than it strengthened it.
Hubbard too had beneficial conditions in 2010 that would have made it harm for him not to take a majority.
For one, the Democratic Party was pretty much dead at the outset of the 2010 cycle, and it held control of the Statehouse only because the ever-languid Alabama electorate had not yet appreciated that a corpse shouldn’t be running state government.
For another, it was quite a boon that Hubbard’s most important election happened two years after the election of a black president, and coincided with the Tea Party wave, in a state prone to both the worst kind of racially motivated voting and the antiestablishment populism as which it often masquerades.
Hubbard does deserve some credit. The benefits he had in 2010 do not diminish the trench work he did to mold the Alabama GOP into an organization finally capable of winning an electorate who already agreed with them anyway.
But he isn’t a genius because he read a book.
When the Republicans took over in 2010, I joked that the meaningful difference between them and Alabama Democrats wouldn’t be ideology, but intent. Democrats had left the state starving in a locked basement out of neglect, Republicans would do it because they meant it.
Based on a half-decade of results, I think I grossly overestimated the capabilities of the people Hubbard shepherded to Montgomery.
Inexorably tied to Hubbard’s downfall is Gov. Robert Bentley, who could be impeached for a sex scandal finally disclosed because he was allegedly (but believably) stupid enough to fire the state’s top cop for aiding Hubbard’s prosecution.
As for the rest of state government that Hubbard helped forge, here is a debilitating series of tweets:
Unlike Emanuel’s fast-collapsing majority, the hold on Alabama Hubbard achieved won’t go away anytime soon, even with those results. The Alabama Democratic Party remains a corpse. The electorate remains unwilling to move for anything more meaningful than showing its ass.
But this begs the question what exactly Hubbard and his boosters expected from investing in doing what Democrats did so poorly ahead of them, but a little bit worse. A little more cheaply.
There may have been some short-term benefits to the right people, but looking at Alabama’s trajectory, it is worth remembering that the guy who gets a good deal on a Corvette in a radiation cloud still ends up coughing blood.
To which I wonder:
You pay money for that shit?
More by Jackson Royal
- Alabama leadership is a weird stack of crap right now, and it’s exactly what the state wanted.
- Local governor loves to fly.
- That time I walked in a hurricane.
- Steve Sarkisian looks to have problems. Maybe we could talk about them without being dicks.
