All that speculation last year that disgraced former Alabama judge Roy Moore might run for the Senate never made a lot of sense to me. Moore doesn’t want to move to DC to be one of 100; he wants to be in charge, enjoy broad power, and stay in Alabama.
With this in mind, it only makes sense that Moore is eyeing Alabama’s 2006 gubernatorial race.
Ousted Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore said Friday he is considering running for governor in 2006 because he has received so much encouragement to make the race.
“I’ll be praying about it and considering it,” Moore said at a meeting with reporters.
Moore was ousted from his job as Alabama’s chief justice in November 2003 for refusing to follow a federal judge’s order to remove his 5,280-pound Ten Commandments monument from public display in the state judicial building. He appealed his ouster to the U.S. Supreme Court, but lost.
Moore, who has always run as a Republican, said that if he returns to politics, it would “more than likely” be as a Republican. That could possibly put him in a head-to-head GOP primary battle with Gov. Bob Riley, who has not yet said whether he will seek a second term.
Riley’s popularity suffered greatly last year after unveiling a plan to revamp the state’s tax structure. In addition, Moore personally loathes Riley because the governor refused to help Moore defy a federal court order. It’s easy to imagine Moore challenging Riley in a GOP primary and winning fairly easily.
But is Moore a lock for the general election? I’m not so sure.
Yes, Alabama is about as red as a red state can be (Bush beat Kerry here 63-37, while Republican Sen. Richard Shelby one his race 68-32). But state races aren’t nearly as one-sided.
Democrat Don Siegelman won the Alabama governor’s race in 1998 fairly easily (58-42) and very narrowly lost re-election in 2002, losing by only 3,000 votes out of 1.3 million cast. To say that the Republican candidate for governor in Alabama is always a certain victory just isn’t true.
Even with Roy Moore, who enjoys a cult of personality in the Alabama, there are limits. When he ran for the state Supreme Court chief justice post in 2002, he won the GOP primary by 25 points — but won the general election by only 8 points. A solid win, but hardly a landslide.
Conventional wisdom may tell us that the popularity of Moore’s religious crusade will propel him to the governor’s office easily, but I’m a little skeptical. Alabama’s state government is under severe financial stress, state prisons are overcrowded, school funding is among the worst in the nation, state troopers are being laid off, and the transportation system needs an overhaul. Roy Moore may want to turn America into a Christian theocracy, but he’s never run anything bigger than his judicial office and he has literally no experience in state government outside his judgeship, from which he was fired for violating judicial ethics.
I don’t doubt that Alabama voters embrace Moore’s religious crusade; I’m just not sure they’ll elect him governor. Indeed, they’ve already experimented with an inexperienced moral-crusading governor in the 1990s. His name was Fob James, he loved the Ten Commandments, and nearly bankrupted the state through fiscal mismanagement. Moore would like to pick up where James left off. Voters may hesitate before saying, “Amen.”