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Dear Alabama, Are You Really The State You Told Me You Were?
I’ve traveled Alabama from north to south, east to west. Everywhere I went, people assured me Alabama was looking to the future.
As a business journalist, it’s hard to think of another state that has been more aggressive during the past three decades in attracting investment. Mississippi has tried hard, Texas has certainly been successful.
But Alabama seemed unique: a state whose business and government leaders wanted to be part of the global economy, and which made clear that it wanted to leave its tumultuous history behind it.
Now, Alabama has a critical choice in its U.S. Senate special election. It can remain part of the world it has been courting for the past 30 years.
Or it can embrace a choice that threatens to undo all the progress it made, in terms of its public image, and all the promises of progressiveness that it made to the global companies it lured there.
I don’t doubt that Republicans desperately want to hang on to their slim majority in the U.S. Senate. I grew up in politics — Republican politics, in fact.
Once you’ve lusted for power and get it, that’s hard to give up. Believe me, I’ve covered a state legislature. I ‘m familiar the cynicism that says, it’s okay to put an alleged sexual harasser in…
