MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Don Odom stood quietly at the back of a
conference room Saturday morning at the Renaissance Hotel. Tall
and muscular, with a shaved head, goatee and wire-rim glasses,
Odom has never been officially involved with the Alabama GOP. The
truck driver from Dothan said he hadn’t been sure whether to
accept an invitation to attend the state Republican Party’s
annual winter gathering.
“Used to be, I’d wake up every four years and go vote, then
I’d go back home and go back to sleep for four years,” Odom
explained. For the past year, however, he has been politically
wide awake. He recently became chairman of the Wiregrass
Patriots, one of Alabama’s Tea Party groups that have turned
up the heat on politicians in the state.
According to a
Gallup poll released last week, Alabama is already the most
conservative state in the union, but it’s not yet conservative
enough for grassroots activists like Odom. While last weekend’s
Tea Party convention in Nashville was making national headlines,
the real political impact of the grassroots movement was evident
among Republicans who gathered Friday and Saturday in
Montgomery.
“People are fired up,” said state GOP executive director
John Ross, adding that his party won two special elections in
2009 and has high hopes for a breakthrough in this year’s
mid-terms. Those who don’t follow Alabama politics are often
surprised to learn that Democrats still control the state’s
legislature, Ross said.
“The legislature is their last stronghold,” he said. “We
feel like this is our shot.”
In a year that has already seen Republican Scott
Brown capture the Massachusetts Senate seat held for decades
by Ted Kennedy, GOP hopes are high here.
“Alabama is the reddest state in the union and we’re going
to make it even redder,” state party chairman Mike Hubbard
declared at Friday’s Ronald Reagan dinner, which drew a record
700 attendees at $100 per plate.
Making this red state redder means making moderate “Blue
Dog” Democrats an endangered species in November. The prime
congressional target for Alabama’s Republicans is Rep. Bobby
Bright, whose 2nd District encompasses the Wiregrass region where
Odom’s group has become a force to be reckoned with, as has the
Wetumpka Tea
Party, led by Eric and Becky Gerritson.
The anti-establishment mood represented by the Tea Party
movement is a factor in the Republican crusade to unseat Bright,
who won the 2nd District seat by a narrow margin in 2008 and
whose re-election race is rated a “toss-up” by
the Cook Political Report.
Montgomery City Council member Martha Roby, who announced
as a GOP candidate last May, was cited by
Roll Call as a recruiting success story for the National
Republican Congressional Committee. Roby raised $125,000 in the
six weeks after she announced her candidacy, but being the
handpicked choice of the national GOP establishment may prove
more curse than blessing in a year when Republicans are in the
midst of a populist insurgency. Many grassroots conservatives are
suspicious of the party insiders who disastrously backed
Dede Scozzafava last year in the New York 23rd District
special election, and whose support of Charlie
Crist in this year’s Florida Senate primary sparked a
sharp backlash.
Montgomery businessman Rick
Barber announced last month that he would also seek the
Republican nomination in the 2nd District, bringing his own Tea
Party activism into the campaign. A 34-year-old former Marine
sergeant and pool-hall owner, Barber was among those who
challenged Bright to discuss President Obama’s proposed
health-care legislation in a town-hall meeting during the
congressional recess last August, an invitation that Bright
repeatedly declined.
“Bobby Bright doesn’t like town-hall meetings,” Barber said
Saturday in his presentation to a meeting of 2nd District
Republican officials, telling the story of one August
confrontation. “We got a large group of senior citizens
together.… About 40 or 50 of us showed up at his office one
morning. Bobby Bright was there.… He snuck out the back door —
didn’t even come out and acknowledge that all these seniors had
showed up to voice their concern about the health-care bill.
That’s not leadership.”
In addition to owning Déjà Vu Billiards in
Montgomery, which has become a regular meeting
place for Tea Party activists, Barber is a computer
technology consultant whose business experience informs his
approach to politics.
“I’m a big believer in simplicity,” he explained Saturday,
while driving to Millbrook in Elmore County to
shake hands at the town’s pre-Mardi Gras parade. “Confusion
is the biggest barrier to making decisions.… If you can’t measure
it, you can’t manage it — those are things you learn in
business, and those are things practiced in the military.”
Despite Bright’s claims to be conservative, the Democrat
has been “voting with Nancy Pelosi 70 percent of the time,”
Barber told the district Republican officials. Promising to “take
a stand” and “draw a line in the sand,” Barber said “that Blue
Dog label has got to go.”
Barber isn’t the only military veteran with Tea Party
support seeking a congressional seat in Alabama this year. In the
state’s 5th District, former Navy aviator
Les Phillip is challenging Rep. Parker Griffith, whose
switch from Democrat to Republican made headlines last
month.
A native of Trinidad who came to the United States with his
parents when he was 8, Phillip could become the first black
Republican elected to Congress from the Deep South since
Reconstruction. His message of American exceptionalism and
limited government draws enthusiastic applause at Tea
Party events and has earned the endorsement
of Mike Huckabee.
As with Barber’s primary contest with Roby in the 2nd
District, however, Phillip finds himself contending against the
GOP establishment. The NRCC is pledged to support Griffith, as a
spokesman for the campaign committee
explained last month: “Parker Griffith is now a
member of the Republican conference, and by definition the NRCC
is the political arm of the House political conference. He is in
effect a member of the NRCC.”
Campaigns by political newcomers like Barber and Phillip
show how energized Alabama Republicans are in 2010, according to
the state party’s executive director. “We’ve got so many people
who have never run for office before,” Ross said. “They’re
saying, ‘I’ve got to step up and do my part.’”
Odom is also stepping up to do his part as a Tea Party
activist. The 47-year-old Dothan trucker explained that, before
being inspired by Fox News host Glenn Beck to join the movement,
he hadn’t considered himself responsible for the failures of
government.
“I always said, ‘It’s the politicians’ fault,’ but it’s
not,” Odom said. “It’s ‘We the People.’ It’s our fault, because
we let it happen.”
