The first punch of the new year in Alabama’s governor’s race was thrown across the party line, months before either combatant had won a nomination — and it landed on the most sensitive subject in state government.
A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, the Democratic front-runner, distributed a release with a headline framed as a question: “If Bradley Byrne Thinks PACT Contracts Have No Legal Standing, How Can 48,000 PACT Families Trust Him to Stand Up For Their Interests?”
What PACT was, and what went wrong
The Prepaid Affordable College Tuition program was created to let Alabama families lock in the cost of a college education by paying in advance, years ahead, at prices set when the contract was signed. Roughly 48,000 families had bought in. The program’s assets were invested, and the investments were expected to grow fast enough to cover tuition when the children came of age.
Then the market collapsed. By 2009 PACT was badly underfunded, tuition at Alabama’s public universities had risen sharply, and the program faced the prospect of being unable to pay what it had promised. Families who had done exactly what the state told them to do — save early, pay in advance — were told their contracts might not be honored in full. The political fury was bipartisan and enormous.
State Treasurer Kay Ivey, herself a Republican candidate for governor, was the titular head of the program, and she was carrying it through the campaign like an anchor.
The remark
Byrne made the comment that drew the attack while guest-hosting the Dale Jackson Show, a north Alabama talk radio program. “I’m not telling you there’s a legal obligation on behalf of the state to fix this problem,” he said. “There’s not.”
The Davis campaign said Byrne was reverting to his previous career as a lawyer, reaching for a technicality to take the state off the hook for a program that had been marketed to families as a binding obligation.
The context Byrne’s camp supplied
The Byrne campaign produced the full quotation, and the full quotation is a different animal:
“A lot of good people around this state invested some pretty hard-earned money in that program based upon that assurance from them. Now, I am not telling you there is a legal obligation on behalf of the state to fix this problem. There’s not. But there is a moral obligation, and in my judgment, and the way I look at things, a moral obligation is actually a lot more important than a legal obligation. So I think the state does have a moral obligation to fix this problem.”
Byrne spokeswoman Marty Sullivan wished the Davis campaign a happy new year and encouraged its staff “to resolve for 2010 to focus on honest debate of the issues and to give up the undignified practice of knowingly misleading Alabamians by taking the statements of those they oppose out of context.”
Why Davis did it anyway
The attack revealed more about the strategy than about the quotation. Davis was behaving as though the Democratic primary against Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks were already settled and the general election against Byrne had begun. Byrne, for his part, was campaigning with the same assumption from the other direction — though he still had to get past Tim James, Roy Moore, Ivey, Bill Johnson and state Rep. Robert Bentley on June 1.
Both assumptions turned out to be wrong. Sparks beat Davis in the Democratic primary. Byrne led the Republican primary but lost the runoff to Robert Bentley, who beat Sparks in November.
But PACT was not a manufactured issue, and Davis’s instinct about it was sound. It touched tens of thousands of Alabama households directly, cut across party lines, and involved a promise made by the state itself. Any candidate who could persuade those families he would make them whole had found a constituency.
The Mobile dimension
The exchange also confirmed something about the shape of the year. Byrne was born in Mobile and represented Baldwin County. Davis had the endorsement of Mobile Mayor Sam Jones, while many of Jones’s most prominent supporters — including business figures who had backed him from the start of his 2005 campaign — were solidly behind Byrne.
If the race unfolded as both men expected, the Gulf Coast would be one of its principal battlefields, and a good many people in Mobile would find themselves choosing between friends.