Elaina Plott, a national political reporter, is covering the Republican Senate primaries in Alabama. She offered this idea of what drives Mr. Sessions.
MOBILE, Ala. – There’s an old quote from Jeff Sessions who, in my months of covering his long campaign for his old Senate seat, has stuck with me.
In 1986, the Senate rejected Mr. Sessions’ nomination for federal district banking on charges of racial insensitivity. However, just 10 years later, there he was, back in Washington, this time as a newly elected member of that august body that had rejected him so flatly. “I don’t know if ‘vindication’ is the right word,” he told The Montgomery Advertiser when he moved into his new office. “But there is a feeling that life is a wonderful thing and that things work out in the end if you keep your head up and try to do it right.”
A saccharine sentiment, no doubt, but instructive, in my opinion, as to why for Mr. Sessions, what is at stake in the Republican second round of the Alabama Senate is much more personal than political.
For most of his career, things had worked for Mr. Sessions. By supporting an ultra-conservative agenda, countering Republican orthodoxy on issues like trade and immigration, he was rewarded by Alabama voters with four consecutive terms. He was fired by many of his Republican Senate colleagues as an extremist candidate, but remained committed to his views. And, after years of patience, he finally found redemption in Donald J. Trump’s presidential bid.
The problem was that, in one specific case, Sessions, Trump’s elected attorney general, and his new boss had a very different understanding of what he seemed to be trying to do the right thing. Sessions chose to recuse himself from the investigation into Russia’s influence in the 2016 elections. He clung to the recusal, convinced that it was the right path. And for the first time in his three-decade political career, things did not work out in the end. Trump forced Sessions to leave office in November 2018.
On a recent June afternoon, after leaving a Ruby Tuesday in South Alabama, after speaking with Mr. Sessions for two hours, it seemed clear to me that this race was, for him, a last effort to finish his career. politics. on their own terms. A way to reaffirm that, ultimately, a man’s insults were not enough to invest almost everything he believed to be true: about politics, about people, even about his own state.
