The Republican contest for Mobile County district attorney moved onto television screens this week, with veteran assistant district attorney Ashley Rich rolling out the first in a planned series of commercials and her opponent’s advertising drawing an angry demand that broadcasters pull it off the air.
Rich, a 14-year prosecutor in the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office, built her new spot around a phrase that had become the spine of her candidacy: she was a "prosecutor, not a politician." The advertisement, which began airing Saturday, May 8, was described by her campaign as the opening installment of a sequence of ads intended to walk voters through her courtroom record ahead of the June 1 party primary.
A contest over who owns the courthouse
Rich faced Mark Erwin, a former chairman of the Mobile County Republican Party who worked as an assistant county attorney and served as a municipal judge in Saraland. Erwin campaigned on the promise of a fresh start in the prosecutor’s office and pressed the argument that Rich was too closely tied to John Tyson Jr., the Democrat who had run the district attorney’s office for 16 years.
The strategy set up an unusual dynamic for a Republican primary: two GOP candidates arguing less about each other’s politics than about their distance from a Democratic incumbent who was not on the ballot. Erwin’s commercial leaned on that theme with a rhetorical style that observers said recalled Ronald Reagan‘s famous question to voters in the 1980 presidential campaign and George H.W. Bush‘s hard-edged treatment of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Herman Thomas campaign demands the ad be pulled
Erwin’s spot criticized the Tyson office for its handling of the prosecution of former Circuit Judge Herman Thomas, the case widely known locally for allegations that Thomas had paddled inmates. Thomas was acquitted at trial. By the spring of 2010 he was running for the Alabama Senate in District 33, challenging incumbent Sen. Vivian Figures in the Democratic primary.
The Thomas campaign called on Erwin and on the stations carrying the commercial to take it down, arguing that the spot effectively asked viewers to convict Thomas of charges a jury had rejected. Campaign spokeswoman Kim Pettway described the commercial as "derogatory" and called it "unacceptable."
The exchange knotted together two races that would otherwise have run on separate tracks — a Republican primary for prosecutor and a Democratic primary for a state Senate seat — and it underlined how much of the 2010 campaign season in Mobile County was being fought over the record of the district attorney’s office itself.
Why the office mattered
The Mobile County district attorney is the county’s chief criminal prosecutor, with authority over charging decisions in everything from street crime to public corruption. Tyson, who had held the post since the mid-1990s, had spent much of the previous year detailed to a statewide gambling task force, a role that had drawn criticism from some local Republicans who said it pulled resources away from crime-fighting at home. That backdrop gave both GOP candidates an opening: Rich by promising continuity of professional prosecution without the politics, Erwin by promising a clean break.
- Ashley Rich: 14 years as an assistant district attorney; campaign theme of "prosecutor, not politician."
- Mark Erwin: former Mobile County GOP chairman, assistant county attorney, Saraland municipal judge; campaign theme of a fresh start.
- The date: Republican primary, Tuesday, June 1, 2010.
With three weeks left before voters went to the polls, both campaigns signaled that the airwaves would carry the argument the rest of the way.