This is the final installment of a three-part series written by Yellowhammer News’s state political reporter Adam Thomas after he spent a day with Governor Bentley and his team on the governor’s “Road to Economic Recovery Tour.”
Part 1: A day with Governor Bentley on the “Road to Economic Recovery”
Part 2: Bentley’s pursuit of the magic number, 5.2
On May 13, 2009, State Representative Robert Bentley launched his candidacy for governor with a two-day, seven stop bus tour. He had no name recognition outside of his Tuscaloosa-area district. Early statewide polling showed him sitting at around 2 percent.
One veteran Republican senator now sheepishly recalls his response to hearing about Bentley’s announcement:
“Who?”
A year and a half later Bentley was elected Governor of Alabama, garnering roughly 60 percent of the vote.
Needless to say, a lot has changed since Bentley’s first statewide campaign. He’s now the popular incumbent with ubiquitous name ID and over a million dollars in his campaign war chest.
I asked Governor Bentley if his early fundraising push was meant to deter potential challengers from getting into the race.
“It was,” he said calmly, “and I really hope we don’t have to spend very much of it at all.”
So far, so good.
Former Morgan County Commissioner Stacy George is the only challenger who has announced his candidacy, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who considers him a legitimate threat.
Other names that have popped in and out of the rumor mill include state school board member Mary Scott Hunter and Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle. Both of their names have found their way into statewide surveys and push polls run by unspecified groups in recent weeks.
It is probably fair to say that there is — at the very least — a resourceful group of individuals in the state who would like to see Bentley face a legitimate primary challenger in 2014. They just have not been able to convince anyone to run against an incumbent governor whose approval ratings routinely rise into the 70s.
Several Democratic retreads have been mentioned as possible general election challengers. But with their state party in disarray — not to mention the conservative leanings of Alabama voters — it is hard to imagine any Democrat winning a statewide election in the near future.
“It’s up to the people,” Bentley told me. “I have total trust in the people of this state. When I came into office, every rainy day fund had been borrowed out and we’d been living off of stimulus dollars from the federal government. This state was totally, 100 percent broke.”
The governor says voters should judge the decisions he made to address the state’s fiscal issues when considering whether or not he deserves a second term.
“My first decision was that we were not going to raise taxes,” he said. “We were going to streamline government and make it more efficient.”
Bentley pushed to refinance the state’s bonds, asked state employees to pay a little more for their retirement, and did away with the Deferred Retirement Option Program (DROP), which was making millionaires out of teachers union executives and college bigwigs while costing taxpayers almost $60 million each year.
“We have saved the state of Alabama a billion dollars just by the things we have done,” Bentley proclaimed.
But there is still one more legislative session’s worth of pitfalls to get through before Governor Bentley and the GOP-controlled legislature can march on to re-election.
Bentley, whose occasional brushes with the legislature have been well documented, indicated that he would prefer the 2014 session be an uneventful one.
“I hope they pass a budget and just go home to tell you the truth,” Bentley quipped before immediately turning his attention to paying down the state’s debt. “We owed $437 million to the Education Fund when I came into office. We will have that down to about $100 million by the end of this year and we have to pay it off by 2015. We owe $161.5 million to the General Fund, and we will pay that off slowly over a 10-year period. If I’m in this office for another five years, we are going to get our debts paid back.”
Follow Adam on Twitter @AdamYHN
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