If Republican grandees in Washington hadn't been so determined to handpick Alabama's next senator, they might not be burdened now with the law-breaking, religious zealot Roy Moore, a man nostalgic for America's slave-owning past and an alleged child molester, as their candidate.
"It's the stupidest string of nonsense that I've ever seen in my life," Alabama political writer Josh Moon told me as he recounted the chain of clumsy missteps and scandals that led Republicans to blunder into this colossal mess of an election with Moore on their ticket.
Establishment Republicans in Washington had wanted former Alabama attorney general Luther Strange to represent the party. Strange had already been appointed to the Senate, picked to serve on an interim basis by then-governor Robert Bentley. That seemed to the D.C. apparatchiks to have gone pretty smoothly.
Senator Luther Strange, the Republican establishment's choice, was tarnished in voters' eyes by a political scandal that engulfed the governor who appointed him. (Brynn Anderson/Associated Press)
But the truth was that it hadn't gone smoothly at all. As attorney general, Strange had been in charge of investigating a sex and corruption scandal involving governor Bentley. He'd abandoned that for the Senate appointment.
To Alabama voters it smelled fishy — as though Strange got the Senate seat as a quid pro quo for shutting down his investigation of the governor.
When all the dirt came out, Bentley resigned in disgrace. But Strange came away from it badly damaged too.
"And so out of that everybody said, 'You know what? We really hate Luther Strange, and he will never have that Senate seat," says Moon.
'In strolls Roy Moore'
Still, up in D.C., Republican fixers missed all the warning signs and continued spending millions of dollars to mow down every reasonable alternative to their preferred candidate in the Alabama Senate primary.
Strange lost anyway and, says Moon, "in strolls Roy Moore," a former Alabama state judge with a history of controversy. Soon after came the allegations, reported by The Washington Post, about Moore's behaviour with young girls decades ago.
Roy Moore has the full-throated support of President Donald Trump. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
For a couple of weeks Republicans tried to wriggle out of the disaster they'd made for themselves by standing up for Moore's accusers — "I believe the women," said Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
D.C. Republicans tried asking Moore to step down. They tried threatening him with expulsion if he wins the Senate election. They tried withholding money from his campaign.
But they gave all that up when the president donated his full-throated support to Moore and urged Alabamians to get out and vote for him.
At a moment when women are coming forward almost daily to speak about their experiences with harassment — and worse — in the workplace, Republicans took off to their own little corner to have a much narrower conversation — one where the urgent question is whether women with no reason to lie, who independently tell similar stories, should be believed over men who appear to have every reason to lie.
Like Moore, Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
President Trump has a particular motive for casting doubt on accusers. In his election campaign last year, more than 10 women came forward to make allegations about his conduct that included sexual assaults. He denied their stories even though their descriptions of his behaviour matched the kind of things he was caught bragging about on a taped segment for the TV show Access Hollywood.
He was elected president anyway and so Moore can be encouraged by that example to follow the same script. So can many others who speak in his defence.
Innocent until proven guilty
Travelling through Alabama last week, I heard the same argument again and again from people I spoke with directly and others calling into talk radio: every citizen is entitled to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
That's true. But the truth of it can be an enabling thing for people like President Trump and Moore. As Beverly Young Nelson recalled in her vivid account of how Moore allegedly attacked her in his car when she was a teenager and he was a lawyer in his early thirties: "You're just a child," she says he said. "I am the district attorney of Etowah County, and if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you."
That has been the problem since the year zero and the president and the judge are not helping to change it.
Life teaches that people tend to believe what they want to believe, so if Moore is elected on Tuesday it will be because a majority of voters didn't believe or didn't care enough about the allegations against him.
Moon, who writes a column for the Alabama Political Reporter, calls what's happening in the Senate election another step in the Alabama-ization of American politics that began with the president's election last year. He's written an apology for it.
"Dear America. We're sorry," it begins. "I told you last November that no amount of lowering expectations could possibly prepare you for the river of lunacy that was rushing towards you.
"And, well, let's just say, I nailed that one."
Tomorrow he expects to see Alabama voters pick the accused child molester to represent them in the United States Senate.
