Nine months before Mobile voters return to the polls, the city’s business, civic, professional and political establishment has arranged itself behind Mayor Sam Jones in a manner that leaves little to the imagination.
A fundraising reception for the mayor is set for Thursday, Dec. 11, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the home of Matt and Phyllis Metcalfe. The price is $1,000 per couple. The host committee runs to nearly 150 names — a roster that reads less like a campaign list than like a directory of the people who run things in Mobile.
Old rivals on the host list
The most telling names on it belong to two people who once tried to keep Jones out of the office he now holds. Ann Bedsole and John Peavy both ran against Jones in the 2005 mayoral race. Jones defeated Peavy in a runoff to become the first black mayor in the history of a city founded in 1702.
Three years later, both are listed among the hosts and hostesses inviting Mobile’s donor class to the Metcalfe home on the mayor’s behalf. In municipal politics, few gestures are read more clearly. A challenger who has made peace with an incumbent is a challenger who is not running.
The roster
The host committee gathers, in one document, most of the strands of civic power in the city. Former Mobile Mayor Mike Dow, whose retirement opened the seat Jones won, appears on it with his wife. So does former U.S. Rep. H.L. “Sonny” Callahan. So does Jimmy Lyons, the director of the Alabama State Port Authority, whose docks were then in the middle of the biggest expansion in their modern history.
The list includes developer and philanthropist Abraham A. Mitchell; businesswoman Celia Wallace; attorney Cecil Gardner; attorney Palmer C. Hamilton; businessman Harris Morrissette; former state transportation director Perry Hand; and Charles Story, the retired executive who had recently described to a civic club the quiet workings of the community’s behind-the-scenes problem-solvers. Lawyers, doctors, bankers, contractors, shipping executives, ministers and old political hands fill out the remainder.
Why it mattered
Mobile’s municipal elections were scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009. As the invitations went out, Jones had no announced opposition.
That combination — no declared opponent, and a fundraiser underwritten by an establishment broad enough to include the mayor’s former rivals — is how incumbency compounds. Money raised early does more than pay for signs and television time. It discourages the campaigns that might otherwise require the signs and the television time in the first place. A serious challenger surveying that host list in the winter of 2008 would have found few obvious places to go looking for a check.
The timing was also a statement about the moment. Mobile in late 2008 was still counting the promise of ThyssenKrupp’s steel complex north of the city, the shipbuilding boom at Austal on the downtown waterfront, and the long campaign to bring aircraft assembly to Brookley. Those projects had been sold to the region as the fruit of cooperation between city hall, the county, the port and the business community. A crowded, expensive host committee at a private home on a December evening was, among other things, an argument that the cooperation should continue.
Context for today
Jones, a former Mobile County commissioner, took office in 2005 and would go on to win re-election in 2009 before losing the office in 2013. The fundraiser at the Metcalfe home belongs to the period when his coalition was at its widest — when the people who had run against him, and the people who had funded the people who ran against him, were writing checks in the same direction.