ALABAMA GOVERNOR TIM JAMES (REFORMER) (2003-2007)
[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT IS AS FOLLOWS.]
Ryker here. Let's just... go. Let's get started.
By 2004, American conservatism- now consolidated under the banner of a single united party- was in a state of crisis. Rosalynn Carter had overseen eight years of post-Cold War peace and an economic boom and was lauded as the second coming of FDR. Congressional Democrats, led by everyone's favorite alcoholic Virginian, had capitalized on the outing of Harris Wofford to push forward the cause of queer rights, with both Adams v. State of Massachusetts and the Baldwin-Achtenberg Act receiving general public acceptance. Southern liberals had controlled the presidency for twelve years despite their home region's general conservatism. And now the Rockies were overseeing the rollout of the fledgling internet across the nation and sparking no small amount of social upheaval amidst the religious right's fears of what that sort of unfettered access to information might do. Something had to give.
My parents both worked on the Wisconsin arm of the Bumpers campaign, and they confirmed that Reformers across the country were sure 2000 would be their year despite their shambolic performance in 1996 (which they attributed to "growing pains" and Donald Rumsfeld's public rejection of their attempt to draft him). Thanks to his experience helping the Rockefeller-Clinton alliance destabilize Faubus's rule in Arkansas and association with the ever-popular Carter, Vice-President Dale Bumpers had been pressured into running for a presidential term of his own; this was despite his being seventy-five at the time, and his choice of running mate did geographically balance the ticket but raised further concerns about his age. The Reformers, on the other hand, had bounced back under the young corporate-backed New Mexico Governor Jeffrey Bezos, who was very much the "anti-Bumpers" as far as the public was concerned. If anyone could flip the Rockies and South at once and carve out a new party system, it'd be him, and yet it turned out Bezos was too hell-bent on kowtowing to his donors to bother trying to appeal to the base. Bumpers' selection of Dottie Lamm, on the other hand, threw a much-needed bone to the Rockies and brought Ted Kennedy out of retirement long enough to make sure KBS stood staunchly behind Bumpers. The only thing the Reformers ended up being right about was that, come November, it wasn't close.
Bumpers was left with as many problems as Nader on his plate as the twenty-first century began and the problems that had been swept under the rug during the Carter administration slowly started to creep back out. Woonsocket remained a radioactive pit and cancer rates were still rising across southern New England. Enforcement of queer rights might've been largely popular, but there was still a very vocal minority that remained violently opposed to us. The Waterkeeper Battalion might've been put down almost a decade ago, but in Dannemeyer's California political radicalization was the rule of the day, and bigots from across the country were getting combat experience as "volunteers" in the South African Civil War. Though, to be fair, a lot of African-Americans also went to South Africa to fight for freedom around the same time- I'm sure we've all seen the iconic photo of Fred Hampton's volunteer militia in front of what was left of the Albert Hertzog Tower. In the American South, the increasingly rusty party machines in Texas and Louisiana had done their job in the nineties, in that they'd kept both states as staunchly Democratic as New York or Idaho despite their conservatism, but the "Reformer Revolution" of 2002 brought them both crashing down as Reformer trifectas took control of both states. Other Southern states, such as Carter's Georgia and Bumpers' Arkansas, also came under the control of Reformer trifectas- even North Carolina wasn't safe, as the political influence of the Research Triangle wouldn't fully manifest until the late 2010s. The only exceptions were Virginia, where Dick Cheney had already quietly refined and perfected the "Howell machine" back when he was governor, and West Virginia, where Charlotte Pritt and Jay Rockefeller's efforts kept the state staunchly yellow. Alabama, unfortunately, wasn't an exception to the rule like the Virginias were, and the previously-obscure businessman Tim James swept into the governor's office and immediately set the state legislature searching for and exploiting loopholes in Baldwin-Achtenberg.
Bumpers was left effectively powerless and reduced to governing via executive order for the next two years as the Reformers, particularly in the South, committed themselves to rolling back the progress of the Carter administration and letting perpetrators of hate crimes and Baldwin-Achtenberg violations get away with a slap on the wrist. Tim James wasn't the only governor actively enabling these, then calling in riot police against protestors and filling the streets with tear gas, but he certainly established himself as the leader thereof. Panicking and searching for a way to salvage the "good times" of the nineties, Bumpers made a snap decision he hoped would help his chances of beating the twelve-year itch and reclaiming Congress as well.
During the last few years of the Carter presidency, before it was clear Dale Bumpers would be running to succeed her, the favorite for the nomination was the popular Attorney General Mazie Hirono, who'd been appointed in Carter's second term following her widely-praised handling of the trial of the Gaithersburg Seven. Only problem was that she'd been born in Japan, so Congressional Democrats moved to ram through the "Hirono Amendment" to remove the natural-born citizen requirement for the presidency to clear a path for her. The constitutional amendment didn't pass until 2002, and when it did it was arguably another reason for the Reformer Revolution, but it was enough that Bumpers was able to drop Lamm from the ticket heading into 2004 and announced that Hirono- whom he'd retained as Attorney General- would be his new running mate.
Bumpers' plan worked. His polling started recovering, young voters were suddenly much more enthusiastic about voting Democratic, and feminists concerned about Lamm's retirement were mollified by her planned replacement with another woman. Tim James decided this was not acceptable. Amidst the Second Lavender Scare sweeping the South and Middle America susceptible to nonsensical fearmongering about black volunteers heading to South Africa being radicalized and taking out their anger on whites upon coming home, James sought to capitalize on this to seize the presidential nomination, hoping his status as a comparative political outsider would help him in a nation getting increasingly tired of machine politics.
There were enough moderate Reformers, largely former Hammond Republicans, who saw James as the second coming of Bob Smith to coalesce around an alternative: Kentucky Senator Elaine Chao, who was ironically only able to run for president thanks to the Hirono Amendment. The hope was that Chao would be able to mitigate the perceived "revolutionary" factor of Hirono's selection as running mate while simultaneously promoting a more quietly socially-conservative message that would still aim for the same end goals. As all focus turned to what was played up as a battle between James and Chao for the soul of their party, James's supporters amped up racist attacks on Chao, painting her and Hirono as two sides of the same coin and... yeah, okay, actually, I'm not repeating the exact things they said. If you're that desperate to hear a bunch of sad white guys saying racist shit, just look up old news footage or something. The important part was James's response to this, which was to all but embrace these racist talking points rather than condemning them as most of the nation expected he would. That played well with former NHP members, and he won the California primary by his largest margins outside the South, but moderates outright walked out when he announced Janet Huckabee as his running mate at the RNC, backing an independent run spearheaded by Fred Upton and threatening to splinter the Reformer Party less than a decade after its creation. If only it'd been that easy.
There were a lot of fears that Upton would deadlock the electoral college, and my understanding is that at least some electors had plans to throw their votes to him if James did win a majority. Turned out relying on racist campaign tactics only hurt him on the national stage, though, and Bumpers managed to toe the line to pull Middle America and hawks from both parties behind him with the vague promise of doing something about South Africa in his second term if he was reelected. And so the "most reluctant president" shocked the nation by winning a second term amidst expectations that the twelve-year itch would surely cost him victory.
James claimed the election was rigged and started rallying his supporters to protest on the National Mall during the certification of the electoral votes. Unfortunately, his motorcade got held up in traffic, so when the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging crashed Flight 559 into the rotunda of the Capitol during the certification of the electoral votes he was still on the other side of the Potomac. Those of his supporters who'd already assembled around the building to start protesting weren't quite the karma Houdini he was.
You know the rest. Regardless of whether you believe Bumpers really did die of a stress-induced heart attack in the PEOC, the end result was the same: the president was dead, and with Vice-President Lamm, Speaker Henry McMaster, and President Pro Tempore Robert Byrd among those killed in the Capitol crash, the presidency passed to the Secretary of State. Tim James wasn't the only person to launch into a hysterical televised rant after Harry Reid took the oath of office, but he didn't even wait for Reid to clarify that he didn't intend to hold the presidency past January 20th before he started calling for violent resistance against what he claimed to be a false flag self-coup.
It's funny. Most of my earliest memories that I actually understood are of the national chaos of 2005. But... nowhere in those memories does Tim James show up. I remember seeing news of the American deployment into South Africa, news of the weird limbo state the executive branch was in until Hirono got confirmed as president, news of the shootings and... but nothing about James. Once I realized that, I ended up spending the better part of three hours searching up videos from the time, watching him relentlessly swap between cowering from the movement he'd helped enable and promoting stochastic terrorism, condemnations pouring in from everyone from Rodney E. Slater to Thomas Ridge to Sean Penn until Alabama Reformers finally mustered the balls to deny him renomination in 2006.
James's final act of cowardice on American soil was to flee the country, joining folks such as Ted Turner and Roy Moore in seeking "refuge" in Australia, where Rupert Murdoch graciously welcomed them to his little slice of hell on Earth and refused to extradite them to the United States. Last I checked, Tim James is still living in exile, screaming about "American tyranny" on the state news networks every chance he gets. It isn't the fate I'd say he deserves, but it's pathetic enough to be a close second.
[MOMENTARY PAUSE, THEN A SIGH.]
I didn't... like I said, this...
I did warn you at the start. This got a little... ranty, and off-topic. But I don't think I have the energy to care about it right now. Just... out of everyone on this list, Tim James actively did the most to try to destroy this country. DiPrete might've affected it for the worst overall, sure, but-
No. I should end this before I make myself angry and end up ranting for another twenty minutes. Final video's coming as soon as I can get myself to record it. Ryker out.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT.]
TOP COMMENTS ON "Profiles in Cowardice | Episode 7: Fear and Loathing in Alabama" BY USER "Ryker D."
Shahana K., one day ago
James's success was also partially due to Reformer fears that America was turning into a Democratic dominant-party state. I know that sounds laughable nowadays (see: the entirety of Christie's second term), but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it looked very plausible. There's a reason almost every near-future sci-fi movie from the time had a throwaway line referencing "President Hirono" or "President Lamm" or "President Cheney" or "President Dorgan"- or even "President Kennedy," if they wanted to be unique. (And only one of those didn't age like milk!)
[20 likes] [0 dislikes] [3 comments]
Tuan M., three days ago
Why do Americans like Dick Cheney so much? In Sri Lanka, he seems like the type of person we would've arrested the moment he walked into Parliament. (Apologies for my bad English.)
[19 likes] [0 dislikes] [2 comment]
Lyle S., three days ago, in response to Tuan M.
Your English is perfect, dude, don't worry about it. Anyway, it's not that Americans like him so much as Democrats do, and that's because their logic is "yes, he's a scumbag, but he's our scumbag and he gets results." There's also that he was phenomenal at pissing off the Republicans/Reformers, which is always a plus.
[22 likes] [1 dislike] [0 comments]
Richard M., two days ago, in response to Tuan M.
"In Sri Lanka, he seems like the type of person we would've arrested the moment he walked into Parliament"
Note to self: move to Sri Lanka ASAP.
[8 likes] [0 dislikes] [1 comment]
Tuan M., today, in response to Richard M.
Please do not.
[24 likes] [1 dislike] [0 comments]
Ollie H., one day ago
I think you have childhood trauma, Ryker. Please consider therapy :-D
[10 likes] [1 dislike] [2 comments]
Jamie L., today, in response to Ollie H.
i think youre a dickhead, ollie. please consider not armchair diagnosing people just because they don't talk about their mental health in excruciating detail online :-D
[19 likes] [1 dislike] [1 comment]
Lyle S., three days ago
Hey, I guessed this one right! You did go off-topic a bunch, but there was so much happening in the 2000s I don't think you'd really be able to talk about James without talking about the era he was a product of. Given that the only time period you've got left to cover here is the 2010s and early 2020s, I'm guessing the final "coward" will be either Pence, Montandon, or one of the Beshears.
[26 likes] [1 dislike] [3 comments]
Gregoire I., one day ago
I've heard it mentioned several times throughout these videos and I'm still confused: what exactly are the Rockies? I thought they were just a mountain range, but the way they're being referred to here, it doesn't sound like it...
[10 likes] [0 dislikes] [2 comments]
Hannah U., today, in response to Gregoire I.
Your profile says you're from Rwanda, so... think of it like a bigger version of the Silicon Circle, I guess? "Rocky Mountains" generally gets used to refer to the mountain range as a whole, while "Rockies" is used for the Boise-to-Denver tech center-corridor-thingy specifically.
[22 likes] [0 dislikes] [1 comment]
Gregoire I., today, in response to Hannah U.
That sounds unnecessarily confusing.
[19 likes] [1 dislike] [3 comments]
Hannah U., today, in response to Gregoire I.
We're aware. We don't like it either.
[18 likes] [0 dislikes] [1 comment]
Jamie L., today, in response to Hannah U.
speak for yourself. i personally revel in the chaos & confusion
[30 likes] [1 dislike] [5 comments]
Kaden P., one day ago
I think you mispronounced the full name of the AWB?
[15 likes] [0 dislikes] [1 comment]
Ryker D., one day ago, in response to Kaden P.
I know. I did that on purpose because I hate them. Hope that helps.
[20 likes] [0 dislikes] [2 comments]
Martin C., today, in response to Ryker D.
As opposed to the time you accidentally pronounced "et al" like the name of the Bug Fables character in the Agnew episode?
[44 likes] [1 dislike] [1 comment]
Ryker D., today, in response to Martin C.
I know where you live, Martin.
[12 likes] [0 dislikes] [1 comment]
Martin C., today, in response to Ryker D.
Yeah? So do I. You aren't special.
[31 likes] [0 dislikes] [0 comments]
