This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
So far this year, the script for Republican primaries has been easy to follow. There’s usually been a fight between the Tea Party movement and the Republican establishment; between “true conservatives” and those dismissed as RINOs; between fierce opponents of any cooperation with “socialist” Democrats and the occasional, hunted-to-extinction statesman interested in bipartisanship. You often don’t need to have a program to know the players.
But in today’s Alabama runoff, you can forgive true conservatives for being a bit confused. That’s because this primary pits an establishment RINO suspect–former Democratic state senator, upper-crust Episcopalian, and career trial lawyer Bradley Byrne–against an Evangelical conservative candidate who is allied with the teachers’ unions.
Allow me to explain. Byrne, who won 28 percent of the vote in Alabama’s June 1 primary, is closely associated with causes that the local Tea Party hates: He came down on the liberal side of the great litmus-test struggle of recent Alabama political history, Governor Bob Riley’s 2003 tax-reform initiative, which would have significantly changed one of the country’s most regressive tax systems, but is remembered by conservatives as an audacious effort to raise taxes. (It was subsequently rejected by Alabama voters in a referendum that is considered a signature victory for the hard right.) Byrne enjoys strong backing from the Alabama business community and mainstream Republican elected officials, including Governor Riley. And in the heart of the Bible Belt, he is a member of that great blue-blooded liberal establishment denomination, the Episcopal Church–an affiliation which may have influenced his near-fatal admission early in the campaign that he did not believe every single word in the Bible was literally true.
Byrne’s opponent in the runoff, Tuscaloosa state representative Dr. Robert Bentley, is a classic conservative Baptist, closely identified with 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. He ran an “outsider” campaign in which he promised not to take a salary as governor, and emerged from the back of a large pack of candidates on June 1 to win a runoff spot. Bentley has been endorsed by the campaign managers for both Tim James–the closest thing to a confirmed member of the Tea Party in the primary–and for Christian Right icon Judge Roy Moore, whose underfinanced candidacy finished a disappointing fourth.
In other words, Bentley should be considered the “conservative insurgent” against the establishmentarian Byrne. Except that Byrne hates teachers unions a lot, and his extremely personal battle with them has taken center stage in the campaign, earning him a lot of sympathy from conservatives. As a state senator, Byrne was a constant enemy of the Alabama Education Association (AEA)–once staging a one-man filibuster against a bipartisan compromise bill that would submit teacher dismissal actions to arbitration–and his antagonism only intensified during his stint as Governor Riley’s appointed overseer of the state’s two-year college network. (It makes sense that one of Byrne’s early gubernatorial endorsements came from Jeb Bush, who shares his strong hostility to teachers’ unions.) During the primary campaign, Byrne’s opposition blossomed into a monomaniacal vendetta against the AEA. Alabama political reporter Kim Chandler captured the tone nicely:
Last fall, Bradley Byrne held a press conference on the steps of the Alabama Capitol. Instead of standing with the white columned capitol behind him for the backdrop favored by most politicians, Byrne faced the capitol so the cameras aimed at him panned down Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue.
Visible over Byrne’s right shoulder was the headquarters of the Alabama Education Association. There, Byrne said, lie many of the problems in schools and in state politics.
“I don’t think AEA stands for the best of their profession. AEA stands for the worst of it,” Byrne said at the news conference.
Public clashes with the powerful teachers lobby have been the trademark of much of Byrne’s 16-year political career and have become a centerpiece of his campaign to be Alabama’s next governor.
This vendetta, in turn, has scrambled Alabama’s political alignments, attracting conservatives who hate teachers’ unions to Byrne, while pushing the state’s Democratic allies into bed with a candidate who, in most other states, would be considered a champion of the hard right.