The race for governor of Alabama arrived in Mobile on the first working day of the new decade, with two Republican candidates in the city on the same day and the same argument between them: who could be trusted to bring jobs to a state that had lost a great many of them.
Byrne picks his backdrop
Bradley Byrne unveiled what his campaign called a comprehensive plan for growing Alabama’s economy and creating jobs at a news conference at Brookley Field.
The location was the message. Brookley, the former Air Force base on the western shore of Mobile Bay, was the site where Northrop Grumman and EADS proposed to assemble the Air Force’s next aerial refueling tanker — a $40 billion contract then in the middle of a bitter, nationally watched fight. It was also home to an Airbus engineering center and to the aircraft maintenance operation that was the largest private employer in Mobile. No single piece of ground in Alabama carried more freight as a symbol of industrial hope.
“That’s why I’ve chosen to introduce my new Job Initiatives for Alabama at the beginning of the first work week of 2010,” Byrne said. Nothing, his campaign argued, transcended the economy as an issue facing the state.
Byrne, a Baldwin County Republican, had a claim on the subject. As chancellor of Alabama’s two-year college system — the job Gov. Bob Riley handed him to clean up a corruption-riddled institution — he had chaired the state Work Force Planning Council and dealt directly with the training pipeline that manufacturers ask about first. He was widely seen as the candidate of the Riley political operation, with all the advantages and the resentments that implied.
Johnson takes the fight to the party
The same evening, Bill Johnson addressed the Mobile County Republican Executive Committee at 7 p.m. at Christ United Methodist Church on Grelot Road. The committee, which ordinarily met at Westminster Presbyterian Church, was rotating its meeting locations around the county for 2010 — a small effort at broadening a party organization that was about to have its best year in living memory. Applications for membership in the committee and the county GOP were available at the meeting.
Johnson’s candidacy was the oddest in the field. He had served in Riley’s cabinet as executive director of the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, and he had built his campaign on attacking the sitting Republican governor’s ethics — alleging lapses within the administration, including the renewal of a multimillion-dollar unbid computer consulting contract.
It was an unusual strategy: running as a Republican in a Republican primary against a popular two-term Republican governor who was not on the ballot. Riley’s team had settled behind Byrne. Johnson was betting that the governor’s accumulated enemies — and every two-term governor has them — would find him.
The Mobile County stake
Both men were courting a county that mattered. Mobile County contained the largest concentration of Republican primary voters in South Alabama, and the local party organization was, that January, in the business of counting them.
The Republican primary field also included Tim James, former Chief Justice Roy Moore, state Treasurer Kay Ivey and state Rep. Robert Bentley of Tuscaloosa. Primaries were set for June 1.
For Mobile, the day’s real interest lay less in the speeches than in the venue Byrne chose. Whoever won the governorship would inherit the state’s role in the tanker fight, in the ThyssenKrupp steel investment north of the city, and in whatever came of Brookley. Standing on that runway to announce a jobs plan was a promise, and everyone in the room understood it as one.