Will the He-Coon Walk Again? Whetstone Weighs a Return to Baldwin County Politics

In Baldwin County, when the subject of the district attorney’s office comes up, the conversation eventually arrives at John David Whetstone. The Republican veteran — known in political circles as the “ol’ he-coon,” a term of respect for an operator who has outlasted his rivals — held the post for years before stepping into private practice four years ago, ceding the office to his assistant, Judy Newcomb.

Now, with the 2010 elections approaching, talk among some criminal defense lawyers has him mulling a comeback. The chatter is the kind that accumulates quietly in courthouse hallways and lunch tables in Bay Minette, where the county courthouse anchors the judicial branch of one of Alabama’s fastest-growing counties. Whether it amounts to anything will depend on a man who has spent decades demonstrating that he moves on his own schedule.

The nickname itself is a piece of Baldwin County political lore, drawn from the old timber-country vernacular for the toughest, craftiest raccoon in the woods. In a county where politics has always been personal as much as partisan, being called the ol’ he-coon is a way of saying someone has survived every ambush the local arena has offered.

The Vulnerability of an Appointee

The speculation is grounded less in Whetstone’s intentions than in Newcomb’s position. Appointed to fill the remainder of Whetstone’s term, Newcomb has not entrenched herself in a way that discourages challengers. That is not necessarily a criticism. Appointees rarely do.

The conventional wisdom in Alabama politics holds that an officeholder has not truly proven herself until voters have been offered a choice and declined to take it — that an official is untested until she has been through the crucible of a contested campaign. An appointment confers the office but not the mandate, and everyone in the courthouse understands the difference. Staff loyalty, courtroom relationships and case outcomes all matter, but the first contested election is the true measure of political standing.

Newcomb’s path mirrors a familiar pattern across Alabama’s district attorney offices, where assistants step up when their bosses resign mid-term, assume the office by appointment, and then face the political judgment of the voters with only part of a term on their record. Some convert the appointment into long tenure. Others discover that the vacancy that elevated them also opened the door for rivals who had waited years.

An open-looking seat in a fast-growing, heavily Republican county is the kind of opportunity that draws attention. Baldwin County’s population boom along the Eastern Shore and the beaches has made its offices considerably more attractive than they were a generation ago. What was once a largely rural county of farmers, fishermen and small-town merchants has become one of the state’s demographic engines, with subdivisions spreading across Spanish Fort, Daphne and Fairhope, and retirees and commuters reshaping the electorate along the coast.

Growth has raised the profile of every countywide office. The district attorney’s docket has grown with the population, and the office’s budget, staffing and political visibility have grown with the docket. For ambitious lawyers in both parties — though in modern Baldwin County, realistically, Republicans — the post now ranks among the more desirable offices on the Gulf Coast.

What Whetstone Actually Says

Whetstone is too savvy a politician to paint himself into a corner, and he did not. But a recent conversation with him suggests he will indeed become more politically active — without going so far as to seek office again.

His stated reason has less to do with Baldwin County than with his party. The Republican Party, Whetstone said, has in recent years lost its way. Both the party and the country would benefit if the GOP would actually practice what it has long preached. He intends to be involved in any movement toward that goal.

It is a striking assessment from a man who spent a career as one of the more prominent Republican officeholders on the Eastern Shore, and it places him among a set of conservative figures in 2009 who were arguing that their party had drifted from the fiscal discipline and limited-government principles it campaigned on.

That current of conservative self-criticism ran through the aftermath of a decade in which Republicans had won elections across Alabama but, in the view of critics like Whetstone, had not always governed the way they had promised. For a veteran prosecutor who built his career on the idea that public offices exist to serve the public rather than the officeholder, the distinction was more than rhetorical. He has signaled that he intends to lend his name and effort to candidates and causes that he believes match the party’s stated principles, whether or not that puts him at odds with the party’s sitting leadership.

The Weight of a Long Record

Whetstone’s years as district attorney left a deep imprint on Baldwin County’s criminal justice system. Longtime courthouse observers still talk about the standards he set for the office, the prosecutors he trained, and the relationships he built across law enforcement agencies from Foley to Fairhope to the county seat at Bay Minette. In a county where the same families have practiced law and served in public office for generations, an officeholder’s reputation compounds over decades, and Whetstone’s remains formidable.

That legacy cuts two ways in any comeback speculation. It gives him name recognition that most challengers spend years trying to build, along with a network of supporters who remember his tenure fondly. But it also means any return would be judged against a remembered record rather than a fresh start, and against the reality that he walked away from the office once already.

Two Sides of the Bay

The contrast with the west side of Mobile Bay is instructive. Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson Jr., a Democrat, appears to be considering his exit from elective office as his statewide ambitions narrow. Whetstone, a Republican, appears to be considering his return to the arena — but as an activist rather than a candidate.

The two men have embodied the political temperaments of their respective counties. Mobile County, larger and more Democratic in its urban core for much of the past century, long elected Democrats like Tyson to countywide office even as the state shifted Republican. Baldwin County, meanwhile, became one of the most reliably Republican counties in Alabama, and its officeholders like Whetstone rode and reinforced that realignment. Now both counties find their district attorney offices at a generational hinge at the same time, with an incumbent Democrat weighing departure and a retired Republican weighing reentry.

Tyson’s deliberations have their own significance for the Gulf Coast. A contested or open district attorney’s race in Alabama’s second-largest county would draw statewide attention, candidates and money, and it would unfold on the same 2010 ballot as the races that could reshape the Alabama Legislature. Whetstone’s decisions, whatever they turn out to be, will be made against that backdrop — a year in which Alabama politics more broadly is sorting out what its officeholders stand for.

The Politics of 2010 in Baldwin County

The approaching election cycle gives the speculation its urgency. Qualifying deadlines will force decisions that coffee-shop talk does not, and the local Republican primary — the only contest that matters in most Baldwin County races — will attract a full slate of candidates for county commission, legislative seats and judicial offices. A district attorney’s race on top of that would command attention at the top of the local ballot.

Prospective candidates in Baldwin County politics traditionally spend the months before qualifying taking soundings: talking with defense lawyers and deputies, testing donor interest, and watching whether the incumbent draws serious opposition. By that measure, the defense lawyers’ chatter about Whetstone is itself part of the process, a signal to Newcomb and to any other would-be candidates that the seat is being watched.

Whether the he-coon walks again in the literal sense remains, for now, an open question that Whetstone seems content to leave open. What is not in doubt is that his name still moves conversations in Baldwin County, four years after he stopped holding the office. In a county that has grown as fast as Baldwin has, that longevity of influence is its own kind of tenure — one no election can take away and no appointment can confer.

What a Comeback Would Mean

If Whetstone chose to seek the office again, the race would instantly reframe the local political calendar. A former district attorney challenging the person who succeeded him is the rarest of county races, one in which every voter is asked to compare two records of the same office rather than choose between strangers. Newcomb would campaign on what her office has done with the term she inherited; Whetstone would campaign on the decades before that. Defense lawyers, deputies and courtroom regulars would find themselves, once again, talking about the ol’ he-coon.

His statements so far point away from that scenario and toward a different kind of involvement: supporting candidates, speaking to civic groups, and lending weight to the faction of his party that wants it to govern as it campaigns. In Baldwin County, where a handful of well-known figures can move a primary, that role is not a small one. An endorsement from a man with Whetstone’s standing carries weight with the same voters who would decide a district attorney’s race.

For now, the county watches and waits, as it has learned to do. Decisions will come with qualifying, and until then the talk goes on in the places Baldwin County politics has always lived — the courthouse annex, the breakfast counters along Highway 31, and the quiet conversations between lawyers who remember exactly who held the office, and how.