Alabama’s Unlikely Rebel

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FAIRHOPE, Ala. — In 1968, Paul Davis, an ace political reporter and my colleague at The Tuscaloosa News, sniffed out that former Gov. George Wallace, bored with life as “senior adviser” to his wife, then Alabama’s governor, was pondering a run for president. He was pressuring two local Democratic lawyers, Richard Shelby and Walter Flowers, to fly to California to sue the state for ballot position in its presidential primary. The dangling carrot, as for every Alabama law firm then, was the right to represent the state in highway condemnation proceedings.

“I wouldn’t do it,” Mr. Shelby, now the state’s six-term senator, told me by telephone from Washington on Thursday.

Mr. Shelby, who switched to the Republican Party in 1994, rebelled again last Sunday when he said on CNN that he would not vote for Roy Moore, the deeply flawed Republican candidate in the Alabama Senate race won by the Democratic dark horse, Doug Jones. Mr. Shelby urged voters to write in the name of “some distinguished Republican,” and nearly 23,000 Alabamians seem to have followed suit. It was a fatal drain on Mr. Moore’s tally: By more than 20,000 votes, Mr. Jones became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Alabama since 1992. That was when Mr. Shelby, having not yet changed parties, won his second term.

To outside eyes, Senator Shelby is an unlikely rebel. As his state’s most senior Republican, he reliably supports the business establishment, the banking industry and his favorite pork-barrel cause, the University of Alabama. He is revered by education professionals for his skill in channeling federal dollars to their schools. For students of Alabama politics, he has another distinction. By appearing on CNN, he broke a tradition by which members of Congress from Alabama seldom if ever speak out on a political issue that might be seen nationally as painting the state as a backwater.

That wasn’t always the case. Senators John Sparkman and Lister Hill were tireless evangelists for the New Deal and Kennedy-Johnson era social legislation, except for civil rights. But in the twilight of their careers, they disappointed Alabama moderates by remaining silent when George Wallace took over their party and unleashed a tide of Klan and police violence against the civil rights movement. Congressional noninterference, often expressed as outright political cowardice in confronting home-state malfeasance, remained the norm when Republicans took over the state in the 1990s.

“I did what I needed to do,” the senator said in his soft drawl. “I’ve known Roy Moore for a long time.” Mr. Shelby had been warned that the candidate was considered unsound by “die-hard Republicans” in Gadsden, the town where the 30-something Mr. Moore allegedly cruised the mall for teenage girls. “When the story of the 14-year-old girl came out, I thought, ‘my gosh,’” Mr. Shelby said. “That was kind of the tipping point for me.” He added, “We wanted that Senate seat above everything, but there are some things we don’t need in Alabama.”

Or in Washington. “I thought Roy Moore would be radioactive,” Mr. Shelby said. “That theme ran right through the Republican caucus in the U.S. Senate. They were all concerned about him coming here.”

“I took principle over politics,” he added. “There comes a time when you have to stand up and I did and I hope I made a difference.”

For the last four days, Alabamians in both parties have been trying to clear their heads. Champ Meyercord, a retired Wall Street investor, was surprised to find in a straw poll that his conservative businessmen’s lunch group favored Mr. Jones seven to six, with three others intending to write-in rather than vote for Mr. Moore. The same group went 17 to three for Donald Trump in 2016.

Mr. Jones demonstrated that even in Alabama, the Trump base can be chiseled apart with traditional Democratic tools. As refined by the Jones campaign, these included multiple phone calls to every African-American home in the state, luring away disaffected, college-educated Republican women in the white suburbs, and a multimillion-dollar television ad campaign urging upwardly mobile urban voters not to let the rural Moore supporters shoot Alabama in the foot yet again.

Alabamians are not accustomed to being bathed in national admiration in matters unrelated to football. It’s a pending question whether Alabama’s relentlessly negative Republican leadership can emulate Mr. Shelby’s open-minded flexibility. The day after the election, Representative Bradley Byrne predicted that Republican true-believers would send Mr. Jones back to Birmingham in the next election.

My neighbor here on Mobile Bay, former Representative Jack Edwards, the Republican patriarch who mentored both Mr. Byrne and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, seems more attuned to the winds of change. “What Senator Shelby said seriously helped Doug Jones,” Mr. Edwards said. “He spoke the feelings of Republicans” who don’t “want to see the party drift off the cliff.”

At 89, Mr. Edwards paid tribute to Tuscaloosa, where he long ago served as president of the University of Alabama student body, as a place less afflicted by Alabama’s traditional addiction to self-defeating defiance.

“The Tuscaloosa area has in my career had a lot to do with electing good people,” he said. Mr. Jones carried the county by 57.2 percent to 40.9 percent. Who was it who said all politics is local?