By SKIP TUCKER, Alabama Daily News Featured Columnist
It might be that I’ve determined the reason the Left hates Donald Trump so much. Sure, they don’t like his conservative policies, but there’s a bigger reason: it’s because he wins.
He doesn’t just win, he wins against liberals, in the media and in politics. Trump embarrassed them all. He won against the biggest liberal hero in some time – The Hillary, the reason fairly obvious to conservatives and too many independents.
Compared to Clinton, who many see as not only a liberal but perhaps as an overarching feminist dead set on exalting mainline extremism – that seeming to be in a large sense a willingness to throw open our borders, close the eye against rampant lawlessness in big cities and to throw money toward problems only education can fix.
By contrast, Trump seemed reasonable. So would The Khan.
Reason, however, appears to be a scant commodity within the wild-eyed mindset.
And The Donald operates outside any political box, disdains norms and refuses to let the TV screamers whack at him without whacking back.
One problem with operating outside the political box is that its bounds were set by the very media who too often take advantage of them. At an Alabama Press Association meeting just after Trump was elected, practically every speaker began by noting what a scandal it was that Trump hated the media.
Then an honest man came to the podium. “Of course he hates the media,” he said. “The media hates him.”
“So, shut up,” he explained.
But sometimes the president chews his shoe leather, so to speak. Sometimes he makes mistakes, as do we all. But a mistake by a president is rather far-reaching. And I think one is his forcing Jeff Sessions to resign the office of U.S. Attorney General.
I have known Sessions since he was Alabama’s Attorney General more than 20 years ago. He has been nothing but mainstream honest and resolute. His somewhat boyish exterior is misleading. Scratch his skin and find iron underneath.
When I was editor of The Eagle, I found that one sure way of knowing I was doing the right thing was when both sides of an argument were angry at me.
That is what happened to Jeff Sessions. Media found him too Trumpy, and Trump found him not Trumpy enough. It is an untenable position.
A thing about our state AG office is that it introduced to voters three of the finest public servants I’ve known: Sessions, Bill Pryor and Charlie Graddick. Pryor now is a Federal Judge, and Graddick recently retired from being the presiding judge in the Mobile circuit.
Liberals worked them over throughout their respective careers with slight regard to decency and honor, attacking them with the most ruthless of negative campaign tactics. They fabricated lies about them, then attacked them on the strengths of those very lies.
We see that a lot.
The worst was in 1986, when the State Democratic Executive Committee, in broad daylight, stole the election from duly-elected governor Charlie Graddick, right in front of my disbelieving eyes.
That election contained the elements for a movie thriller and even now it is difficult to grasp the enormity of it and its consequences. It was more than 30 years ago but it poisoned the Democratic Party in Alabama to the point that its recovery cannot be foreseen.
An astounding amount of money was spent, there was enough sex and lies to nourish a New York congressional campaign and a month of CNN combined. And your humble narrator was in the front row. I’ll write about that travesty in more detail and return to those thrilling days of yesteryear. And the circus. But not next week. It will take a while, I reckon, to store enough anti-nausea medication for me to begin the purge.
There’s no question, though, that Alabama – and particularly the Alabama Attorney General’s Office – has molded some of the strongest-mettled politicians you’ll find anywhere. Trump had one in Sessions. Together they scored a lot of wins for conservatives and I fear the president will miss Sessions more than he knows.
Hmm. For fun, I just looked up the derivative word for Democrat. It’s aristocrat. Double hmmm.
(Next week: DT and the Yankees.)
Skip Tucker was editor of the Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper, then communications secretary for gubernatorial folks like George McMillan, Charlie Graddick and Jim Folsom. He ran Alabama Voters Against Lawsuit Abuse for in Montgomery for 15 years. He has published one novel, Pale Blue Light, a spy thriller set in The Civil War. He’s now a regular contributor for the Alabama Daily News at www.ALDailyNews.com.