
          In Wallace's Wake--New Demagoguery for the Eighties
          By Williams, RandallRandall Williams
          Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 10-12
          
          "Alabama has it all," brag the interstate billboards leading into
the Heart of Dixie. The slogan is aimed mostly at Florida- or
Louisiana-bound tourists but nowadays applies equally well to the
contest for the state's governorship.
          The Democratic primary and run-off were held in June, but the
party's nominee was undeclared until August due to legal challenges
and an order by a three-judge federal panel barring certification of
the apparent winner. Among the judges signing the order was Frank
M. Johnson Jr., known by many Alabamians over the past quarter-century
as the "real governor" of the state for the control he exerted in
orders on prisons, schools, mental hospitals, public hiring and civil
rights.
          In the 1960s and 1970s Johnson's legal activism was necessary to
fill the vacuum left by the inaction of Gov. George C. Wallace, who
always found it expedient to let the Federal courts force state
officials to do the politically unpopular. It seemed fitting that
Judge Johnson's latest legal entry into Alabama justice came as
another Wallace vacuum loomed.
          George Wallace, at last, is retiring from the office he has held
for four terms, five if you count the term of his first wife, Lurleen,
who was elected as his surrogate in 1966 when the law forbade
consecutive terms. Contending in Wallace's wake were Lt. Gov. Bill
Baxley, the favorite and the champion of a large but loosely knit
coalition of labor voters, blacks and Wallaceites; former Gov. Fob
James, well-liked by business ("the rich get richer and the poor get
Fobbed"); former Lt. Gov. George McMillan, darling of the
reform-minded and determined to avoid the "wimpy" image that may have
cost him the Governor's Mansion in 1982; and . . . Atty. Gen. Charlie
Graddick, the law-and-order dark horse who has emerged as the latest
demagogue in an Alabama lineage stretching back through George Wallace
to Cotton Tom Heflin and William Lowndes Yancey.
          Graddick is the New version of the Old Wallace. Many who remember
only the extremities of the past find it hard to call Graddick a
racist because he actually does nothing overtly against blacks; his
popularity with racists is due to the fact that he largely ignores the
quarter of the state's citizens who are black, and that he is a
demagogue for the Eighties, a subtle master of euphemisms and code
phrases that communicate racial meaning without the blatantly nasty
words of the previous generation.
          In winning the attorney general's office in 1978, Graddick
transformed himself from an unknown Mobile County district attorney
with a series of stark, loud television commercials claiming he would
get tough on crime. In a speech, he declared he wanted to "fry
[murderers] until their eyes popped out and you can smell their flesh
burn." Once in office, he waged a highly publicized prosecution of
"food stamp cheats" and feuded with the prison commissioner who sought
to relieve the state's growing inmate population through alternatives
such as work release and restitution programs. Critics accused him of
being a poor, frequently reversed prosecutor, indifferent to
white-collar crime and to such public nuisances as KKK paramilitary
training.
          Like former Gov. James, Graddick is an exRepublican who switched
parties to run a state-wide campaign. Although Alabama has become,
since the Second World War, one of the most conservative states,
giving large votes to GOP Presidential nominees, it has not elected a
Republican governor since Redemption. Alabama's junior Senator, former
admiral and POW Jeremiah Denton, is the first Republican elected to
statewide office in more than a hundred years. However, the Goldwater
sweep of Alabama in 1964 elected several Republican congressmen, and
in recent years a growing number of Republicans have been elected to
county and legislative offices. The GOP currently holds two of the
state's seven Congressional districts.
          Graddick and James owe their political careers to that still-small
contingent of Alabamians who have declared themselves Republicans and
to that large and growing block of voters who identify philosophically
with the GOP even though they still call themselves Democrats in state
and local elections. In short, the Reagan vote. Baxley, on the other
hand, stumped vigorously for Mondale and Ferraro in 1984, and he gets
his strongest support from the backers of that losing ticket.
          Baxley was a two-term attorney general before Grad lick, but there
is practically no other similarity 

between the two. Where Graddick
seems to evoke the old racial passions, Baxley repudiates them. A
decade after the fact, he reopened the case of the 1963 bombing of
Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church and convicted a former Ku Klux
Klansman for the murders of the four children. Baxley, a law student
in 1963, said he was motivated by his shame and anger that people
could do such a thing in his state and get away with it.
          As attorney general, Baxley was viewed as a tough, able prosecutor
but may have been most respected for the job he did recruiting a
talented crop of young Alabama lawyers, including some who had left
the state to work on Wall Street and the first black assistant
attorney general in Alabama history. He then prosecuted murderers and
white collar criminals with equal vigor.
          On the negative side, the bachelor Baxley had a reputation as a
playboy and a gambler who had made and lost large sums in Las Vegas
and in the commodities market. Though he had married before making his
first attempt at the Governor's office in 1978. the image stuck with
him, renewed in the recent campaign by intimations of an affair with
an Associated Press reporter who quickly resigned her job and left the
state.
          Baxley led the June 3 primary voting by eighty thousand votes, with
Graddick a strong second. Graddick then picked up the endorsement of
McMillan, causing Baxley aides to charge that McMillan--who had called
Graddick unfit to serve before the election--had offered to endorse
Baxley in exchange for payment of McMillan's considerable campaign
debt. Graddick probably did not need Fob James's endorsement; those
voters had no place else to go.
          Alabama does not require party registration, but voters in its
primaries do pledge to support the party nominees in the subsequent
general election. Alabama law expressly prohibits voters in one
party's primary from supporting another party's candidate in a
run-off.
          Graddick attacked Baxley as the candidate of special interests,
playing up donations of about $100,000 Baxley received from political
action committees supported by the Alabama Education Association and
on Baxley's endorsement by both of the state's black political
organizations. Graddick was the only candidate who did not seek the
black endorsements; in fact, he did not even campaign in the west
Alabama Black Belt. Graddick received more donations than Baxley,
mostly from businessmen, industrialists and business-related political
action committees. Among his biggest contributors were well-known
Republicans, including former Nixon Postmaster Winton Blount, and June
Collier, the "Buy American" auto parts manufacturer who was appointed
by Reagan to the Industrial Policy Advisory Committee.
          Two weeks before the June 24 run-off, polls placed Baxley and
Graddick almost even.
          The Alabama Democratic Party began a statewide campaign aimed at
discouraging the 33,000 voters in the June 3 Republican primary from
crossing-over to vote in the Democratic runoff; there was no statewide
Republican run-off and only token local contests. Candidate Graddick,
the state's top law officer, declared that cross-over voting was
legal. The day before the election, one of his assistants, the chief
of the voting fraud unit of the Alabama Attorney General's office,
after meeting with Graddick campaign officials, issued a letter
advising county election officials that they faced possible legal
actions if they attempted to prevent Republicans from voting in the
Democratic run-off.
          The run-off voting was the closest in recent Alabama history, with
Graddick on top by 8,756 votes, less than a percentage point of the
almost one million total. Graddick's campaign workers began answering
the phone "Governor-elect ..." the next day, but Baxley refused to
concede without a recount.
          Then Baxley supporters filed an election challenge to the state
Democratic Party charging that as many as 20,000 Republicans, far more
than Graddick's margin of victory, had illegally crossed over on June
23. After a few days of deliberation, Baxley filed his own concurrent
challenge. The charges made sense: In a television interview on
election night, Graddick thanked Republican voters and said the
crossover vote had made the difference in the run-off. Jean Sullivan,
a Republican National Committeewoman from Selma also had bragged to
the press that Graddick had been elected by Republicans, and, on the
weekend before the run-off, a series of television commercials had
been aired in which four Republican state senators stated that
crossover voting was legal.
          The party challenge was soon followed by a class-action federal
lawsuit filed by a black county commissioner and his wife alleging
that Graddick had violated Section Five of the Voting Rights Act by
advising voters that it was legal to cross over. Graddick had
illegally diluted the black vote by changing election practices
without preclearance from the Justice Department, the suit charged.
          On Aug. 1, federal judges Johnson, Truman Hobbs and Myron Thompson
ruled on the voting rights issue.
          In strong language, the Court concluded, "The June 24th runoff was
so close, the number of illegal crossover voters so great, and
Mr. Graddick's violation so flagrant, this Court cannot take the
chance that Mr. Graddick received the Democratic nomination as a
result of his illegal actions." The judges barred the Alabama
Democratic Party from certifying Graddick as its nominee and said the
Party could either certify Baxley (if it could be proved that he would
have won except for crossover votes) or could call a new runoff
between Graddick and Baxley.
          "It is absolutely clear," the Court continued, "that as a candidate
and, more importantly, as the Attorney 

General, Mr. Graddick made
every effort to get voters to violate the anti-crossover rule."
          The Court had no sympathy with Graddick's argument that the
anti-crossover rule was unenforced in the two previous elections,
saying, "We note also that during the entire time the crossover law
remained on the books and allegedly unenforced, Mr. Graddick was the
chief legal officer of the state of Alabama."
          With this directive from the federal courts, a five-member
committee of the Alabama Democratic Party began hearing the party
challenges. On August 15, the committee certified Baxley as the winner
based on votes legally cast, although the committee never actually
declared it had evidence showing how many crossover votes had been
cast nor what percentage of the crossovers went to Graddick. The
committee declared Graddick's actions amounted to "malconduct" and
that he had "abused the power of his office" and failed to maintain
"separation between his campaign efforts and the official acts of his
office." The subcommittee, as had the federal court, accepted
statistical evidence showing that almost all crossovers voted for
Graddick, more than enough to change the outcome of the election.
          Graddick then went into federal court himself but was rejected in
an opinion even more sharply worded than the first. The judges said
the attorney general showed "a complete misunderstanding of the
controlling legal principles of the case."
          In true Wallace style, Graddick bitterly attacked the federal
judges, comparing them to a piano player "on the first floor of a
house of ill repute" oblivious to actions on the second floor. He
called himself the "people's candidate" and charged that the election
had been stolen by the Democratic subcommittee, a "gang of five."
          Over Labor Day, Graddick traveled about the state raising funds for
a November write-in campaign. Political observers in Alabama say a
successful write-in campaign would be almost impossible due to the
complexity of the procedures and the effort required of voters, and
would help Baxley by taking votes from his Republican opponent.
          The Republican party leadership, while nervous about a Graddick
write-in, is jubilant over the Democratic in-fighting. The two-party
system has been born in Alabama, optimists among them have declared,
with the expectation that many nominal Democrats are now so disgusted
that they will make the jump to the GOP. The Republican candidate, Guy
Hunt, a quiet former probate judge who could not buy an audience two
months ago and is still often unrecognized as he works the shopping
mall crowds, is a classic case of the man in the right place at the
right time. Whether he has staying power depends on the depth of the
anti-Baxley and anti-Democratic Party sentiment, and on Graddick, who
is demagoguing around the state with the energy--if not the style--of
a young George Wallace. If Graddick drops the write-in campaign and
Hunt proves to be the dull but clean figure he seems, the Republicans'
odds of taking the statehouse will improve from none to possible.
          But November is a long time off, and Baxley can still win. He is a
skillful campaigner and a strong debater, and he has a large following
of loyal Democrats who will work hard for him and the party. His
immediate challenge is convincing the uncommitted that it was
Graddick— not a five-man Democratic conspiracy— who stole their votes
through his willful and greedy violation of the Voting Rights Act.
          
            Excerpts from booklet published during Alabama Democratic
Primary campaign by forces opposed to Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley and linked
to Atty. Gen. Charles Graddick. The comic book-style piece is
customized on the back cover (below) to attack Baxley, but is
otherwise a generic attack on the National Education Association. NEA
officials say the same booklet has been used in other states by
right-wing organizations.
          
          
            Randall Williams is the managing editor of
Southern Changes and a partner in the Black Belt
Communications Group of Montgomery, Alabama.
          
        