Personal failings, public damage

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley apparently has gone Bill Clinton on his family, his administration and his state. Unlike the former president, unfortunately, Bentley doesn’t have anywhere near the political capital or savvy to weather this public humbling and emerge as relatively unscathed as Clinton did.

The Bentley affair (a term too literal in this context to be considered a pun) is at this point in the story as bizarre as it is tawdry.

It involves, among other salacious details, sexually charged 2014 audio recordings of conversations between the governor and a female staffer — recordings apparently captured by none other than Bentley’s now former wife. According to the Alabama online news journal Yellowhammer, the recordings include Bentley making reference to past encounters in his office, at the Governor’s Mansion and at Blount House, a sort of second governor’s residence in Montgomery.

It gets curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say. The staffer involved, Rebekah Caldwell Mason, was Bentley’s communications director, and is still officially on the payroll as an adviser. So is her husband Jon, who is director of the Governor’s Office of Faith-Based and Volunteer Service. (Insert your own joke or wry observation here.)

But the primary whistleblower was former state Law Enforcement Secretary Spencer Collier, once a close friend of Bentley’s whom the governor fired for alleged misuse of state funds — the day before Collier made the existence of the recordings public. Collier said Rebekah Mason has had an inappropriate degree of influence in the Governor’s Office; Mason said Collier has a “clear, demonstrated gender bias.” And so on.

There seem to be as many agendas and motives in this story as there are characters in it.

As for Bentley himself, he issued a public apology for what he says were inappropriate conversations. But while acknowledging that “I made a mistake,” he has insisted that he did not have a physical affair with Mason.

Given the specifics of those conversations, the echoes of Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” are impossible to miss.

What’s so unfortunate about Bentley’s self-inflicted fall from grace — hardly the first for a public figure, to understate the obvious — goes beyond the obviously sordid surface details.

Far worse, and of far greater and more lasting impact, is the perhaps fatal damage to Bentley’s effectiveness as a moral leader in a state desperately in need of moral leadership.

Granted, Bentley’s scandal involves a different realm of morality from the ones Alabama persistently fails to address, most prominent among them its chronic abuse of the working poor for the benefit of the politically and economically connected. Bentley has tried to prevent budget cuts to Medicaid, emergency care, mental health and early education services so critically needed by a poor state’s poorest.

For the rest of his term he might well be, politically if not technically, a lame duck. Right now in Alabama, that matters a lot more than his sex life.

This story was originally published March 24, 2016 at 4:43 PM with the headline "Personal failings, public damage."