How did the Alabama teachers’ union, an affiliate of the NEA, come to fund a political action committee with the name True Republican PAC whose ads attack a Republican candidate for governor as an evolutionist?
The answer seems to involve a mix of political calculation and personal animosity.
The driving force behind the PAC is Paul Hubbert, the head of Alabama Education Association, the state affiliate of the National Education Association.
Hubbert’s role wasn’t immediately apparent. The PAC’s treasurer is the chairman of a county Republican Party. Most of its contributions — some $500,000 — have come from the teachers’ union, but the union funneled that money through other innocuous-sounding PACs, a common practice in a state where PAC-to-PAC contributions are allowed.
Hubbert, who also happens to be a vice chair of the state Democratic Party, eventually came clean to the Birmingham News. But as Hubbert tells it, he didn’t set out to attack Republican gubernatorial candidate Bradley Byrne. Rather, Byrne started it.
“The first ad he ran he attacked us,” Hubbert said. “He started the fight and we sat still for months and months.”
But Republican primary voters weren’t likely to be persuaded by a union, and so Hubbert joined that county GOP chair to form the PAC. To make the attacks more credible, and potentially more damaging, Hubbert’s outfit attacked Byrne from the right. They ran a handful of ads pointing out that Byrne used to be a Democrat and had voted for tax increases. But their most recent, which calls him an evolutionist, prompted Byrne to hail his own creationist credentials.
“All of the things are documented,” Hubbert told the Birmingham paper. “If the truth bothers him, I’m sorry.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Byrne, one of seven Republican candidates for governor, is considered to have a legitimate shot at the GOP nomination. And he could be a strong candidate in the general election against the (presumably union-backed) Democratic nominee. According to TPM Polltracker, March polls from both PPP and Rasmussen show Byrne leading both potential Democratic candidates by 10 points or more.
The state Democratic party certainly doesn’t have a problem with Hubbert’s involvement, even though they deny knowledge.
“It’s kind of a good ad, I must admit,” executive director Jim Spearman told TPM.
But, he said, “I have no knowledge of the PAC … He’s never told me and I’ve never asked.” He added that the AEA is “well within their rights to do whatever on that.”
The state Republican Party, however, isn’t happy about the PAC. “Due to the usage of the name ‘Republican,’ the Alabama Republican Party alerts voters that this political action committee is far from ‘Republican,’ and even further from being ‘True,'” the party said in a statement.
A spokesman told TPM today that the state GOP has asked the PAC’s treasurer, Andy Renner, to resign as Marengo County chair. The spokesman, Philip Bryan, said the steering committee will discuss Renner’s future at their next meeting, after the primary on June 1.
Hubbert did not return requests for comment from TPM, nor did the NEA.
