“Robert Bentley is out of ideas,” Democratic gubernatorial nominee Parker Griffith proclaimed during his 2010 campaign against Gov. Robert Bentley.
A cursory glance at his second term suggests Mr. Griffith may have been right, since Gov. Bentley seems to have ended up implementing — or at least attempting to implement — most of Mr. Griffith’s platform, rather than his own.
On taxes, for example, Mr. Griffith expressed an openness to hikes of some sort, while Bentley’s campaign plastered billboards with his “No New Taxes” pledge all over the state. Once elected, he proposed what would have been the largest tax hike in Alabama history, then went even further by declaring, “For the next four years we’re going to raise taxes.”
On the lottery, Mr. Griffith made the issue one of the main planks in his campaign platform.
“Everybody wants a lottery,” he said in a campaign ad. “The only thing standing in our way is Robert Bentley.”
When Yellowhammer asked if Gov. Bentley had any plans to push for a statewide vote on the lottery, the governor’s Communications Director replied with one word: “No.”
Flash forward to 2016 and Gov. Bentley has called a special legislative session entirely devoted to trying to pass a lottery.
When it comes to their rhetoric on Medicaid, Mr. Griffith came unhinged during the campaign.
“Alabamians are dying!” Griffith declared in a television ad.
The Bentley campaign scoffed at Mr. Griffith’s hyperbole, but in recent weeks the governor said opponents of a lottery to boost funding to Medicaid were in favor of allowing children to die.
After the legislature refused to pass his bill, Mr. Bentley added that, “It was not a vote against me, it was a vote against those children — those half a million children who are in poverty today.”
When it comes to their relationship with the legislature, Mr. Griffith was a fierce critic of Republican legislative leadership on the campaign trail, which would have likely just been a prelude to a contentious relationship with them once he was in office. But Gov. Bentley appears to have butted heads with Republican lawmakers as much or more than Mr. Griffith would have, and the legislature generally dismisses his suggestions.
Interestingly enough, a then-relatively unknown Bentley campaign staffer named Rebekah Mason responded to Mr. Griffith’s proposals during the 2014 campaign by saying, “What Parker Griffith needs is a plan to tell the truth.”
Which is ironic considering the only difference between Gov. Bentley and Mr. Griffith is that the latter seems to have been willing to tell the truth about who he was and what he planned to do.
