No, that woman did not ruin Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley— Robert Bentley did.
Alabama’s former governor burned his own house down. Don’t give him any excuses.
There is an explanation congealing in coverage of former Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley’s downfall. It goes something like this:
He was a good, Christian leader, but that woman done changed him.
This is crap. It exculpates a hypocritical, failed leader who deserves no absolution for the wreckage he made of his personal life and Alabama government. Worse, it gives him credit for something he never was, wrongly portraying his political career as a fall from the perch to the ground, not a fall from the outhouse to the pit underneath.
To thumbnail, Bentley resigned last week after pleading guilty to misdemeanor ethics and campaign finance charges stemming from his relationship with Rebekah Caldwell Mason, a former advisor who roosted as Bentley’s top political aide. The affair ended Bentley’s 50-year marriage, and per a sprawling impeachment report, Bentley used state resources, including law enforcement, to support and conceal the relationship after Bentley’s ex-wife made a recording in which Bentley tells Mason how much he enjoyed groping her breasts. (A lot.)
Bentley, in state and national press, has been described as an unlikely governor—which is a really polite way of saying he was an unqualified rando who the state elected for stupid reasons. Still, it is worth acknowledging that his not overtly being a combative jackass like many other Alabama politicians made him seem likable, and his talking about Jesus a lot also made him seem like he might be some kind of Christian. This is the state of what are considered encouraging signs in Alabama politics.
From The New York Times:
As governor, Robert Bentley would quote the Bible before the Alabama Legislature and say that God had elevated him to the State Capitol. In his dermatology practice, in the city where he was a Baptist deacon, he sometimes witnessed to patients. And when he was a first-time candidate for statewide office, his campaign headquarters were often filled with volunteers from local churches. …
When Mr. Bentley ran for governor in 2010, Christian voters saw extraordinary promise in the obscure lawmaker from Tuscaloosa who liked to tell people about how Bear Bryant, the revered University of Alabama football coach, had been one of his patients. He seemed oddly ordinary, the politician who was thought to be tailor-made for a state increasingly frustrated by decades of corruption in Montgomery.
From al.com:
Despite his House seat, he convinced Alabama he was an outsider’s outsider. He was a devoted family man and he would not be corrupt, he said, because he didn’t need money. He was a doctor, after all, so he wouldn’t even take a salary.
By the time he faced Parker Griffith in the 2014 governor’s race he was a different man. The country doctor was gone. The man who sometimes forgot to put on a jacket in the Legislature, who campaigned in short sleeves, was slicker and straighter and almost Brooks Brothers by his second term. … He was trusted and revered, a man who stood for the things Alabama admires.
Putting aside the corrupting powers of Brooks Brothers’ comfortable and stylish clothing, Bentley was never anything close to approximating a good or Christian leader. Oddly, being an inexperienced political no-name whose election traced back to support by his party’s most bitter opponent, Bentley struggled to bring together his party’s lawmakers or marshal policy.
And while Bentley the dermatologist might have told the odd patient that their rosacea could get better with regular treatment and a closer walk with Christ, he never stood up for actually Christian values when his political career presented the chance. He signed Alabama’s disastrous 2011 immigration law that essentially outlawed being brown in the state. Prior to being governor, he defended the state’s regressive tax system — which places profoundly more burden in its lowest earners than its top ones — by questioning whether people who said they struggled to buy groceries were just “poor in spirit.”
Of course, any defense of Bentley’s talent or intent has dissolved in the past year’s flood of revelations about his affair with Mason. Mason, to her discredit, used the massive influence she gained through her affair with the governor to turn his administration from a second-grader’s civics presentation to a preschool fire.
From al.com’s tick-tock:
It was in the middle of 2013, former staffers say, that Mason issued an edict saying Bentley was not to be shown negative news, whether in daily briefings or conversation. …Staffers who spoke bluntly were dismissed, or maligned, or punished.
“The people love you,” Mason told Bentley again and again. “They don’t understand the way the people love you.”
…
“They don’t respect you as governor,” Mason would say. Or “God put you here.” …
A campaign staffer asked Mason what she planned to do after the [2014 gubernatorial] race.
“We can do anything,” she said. “We’re famous.”
That is a startling kind of ignorance deeply unhealthy for good government, and it is disturbing that Mason had the access and sway to do the damage she did. But Bentley gave her that access, and he gave her that sway, even though Mason had no experience (or idea) how any massive entity is supposed to run. A half-decent human wouldn’t do that just because he got to second base.
Pinning the blame on Mason has an understandable appeal in Alabama. Alabama, its problems as evident as ever, again elected a leader who let it down — with half of its last six governors suffering a conviction for their use of their office, and one of the other three being Fob James. That fact and other scandals raise the questions about whether Alabama government and the collective id that determines its political leadership are inherently broken, and if a path for either to reach something roughly approximating success is achievable within the present generation’s lifetime.
The state will have to grapple with those questions for a while, but their being there does not excuse Bentley from being a morally bankrupt hypocrite who the evidence suggests is a failure in every way that matters as a leader — and who screwed over one of the states that can least afford it. No one should give him an easy out.
