MOBILE – U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner drew a challenger from within his own party this week, and the most quoted handicapper in Alabama promptly declined to give the challenger a price.
The challenge
Peter Gounares, a 35-year-old Orange Beach developer and political newcomer, announced plans to run against Bonner in the 2010 Republican primary for Alabama’s 1st Congressional District. Gounares argued that the incumbent did not represent true Republican values of fiscal conservatism.
His platform called for a balanced federal budget, increased energy exploration within the United States and climate policies “based on sound science, not media hype.”
It was, in its way, an early sighting of an argument that would soon reshape Republican politics nationally. The complaint that congressional Republicans had spent too freely under President George W. Bush – on the prescription drug benefit, on the bank bailout – was about to find organized expression in the Tea Party movement, and a primary challenge from the right would become a routine hazard of incumbency.
The oddsmaker’s verdict
Danny Sheridan, the Mobile-based oddsmaker and political and sports analyst whose lines were quoted nationally, was asked to assess the matchup. He would not post one.
A Bonner-Gounares race, Sheridan said, would be “off the board.” Gounares, he added, was a “huge, huge underdog.”
Sheridan’s assessment reflected the obvious. Bonner had held the seat since 2003, had inherited the organization of his predecessor and former boss Sonny Callahan, and sat on the House Appropriations Committee – a perch that mattered enormously in a district whose economy leaned on federal shipbuilding contracts, hurricane recovery money, port improvements and, above all, the aerial refueling tanker competition that could bring an Airbus assembly line to Mobile.
Bonner’s own pitch
Bonner, for his part, spent the week making an economic argument of his own. Speaking to the West Mobile Rotary Club, the congressman said a five-year moratorium on the capital gains tax would deliver a genuine boost to the economy through means tried and true – unlike, he argued, the 1,000-plus-page, $787 billion stimulus plan President Barack Obama had just signed.
That position placed Bonner squarely with the rest of the Alabama congressional delegation, which had largely opposed the stimulus. It also raised an awkward local question, one being asked openly in Mobile political circles: whether the delegation’s opposition to the administration’s spending would cost the area leverage when the Pentagon finally awarded the tanker contract.
What the race meant
Primary challenges from the right rarely succeeded in 2010 against incumbents as well-financed as Bonner. But their existence changed behavior, pulling incumbents toward harder positions and making cooperation with a Democratic administration politically expensive – even, as in Mobile’s case, when the cooperation might have paid for itself in jobs.
Gounares’s candidacy was, on its face, a long shot that a professional oddsmaker declined to price. As a signal of where the Republican electorate was heading, it was worth more attention than the odds suggested.