Sen. Bishop, Seizing Opportunity, Pt. 2

Sometimes a good story is its own end.
What I know about Jasper’s GOP Senator Charles Bishop (admittedly second-hand) is that he would not deny that he is an opportunist who is unconcerned what others think of him. A party-switcher who publicly calls his Senate colleagues “pinheads” and animatedly addresses a crowd protesting the legislators’ pay increase by asking inexplicably, “How many of you believe those Mexicans need to go back to Mexico?” Bishop, a lobbyist tells me, was the last state Senator to take a swing at another Senator on the Senate floor, and according to an elected official, Bishop once challenged a colleague to leave the Senate floor to settle their differences in the men’s room. This is a man who sets his own course.

There is a story that elected officials like to tell about Bishop’s most recent campaign. (I have heard it at least twice).

Late in the SD-5 race, according to the story, Bishop’s Democratic opponent Larry Cagle went to the Daily Mountain Eagle to run an ad showing Bishop’s past ties (”cancelled checks” one version of the story went) to left-wingers. (By way of example, the left-wing ADC almost gave Bishop the endorsement he sought for the 2002 governor’s race. Their failure to do so caused Rep. Alvin Holmes, D – Birmingham, to announce his resignation from the ADC board.) The point of the ad apparently was that Bishop’s roots were not as conservative as he now professed to be.

Nope, can’t run the ad, Cagle was told. It’s hearsay, unacceptable, and so forth. We won’t run it. Despite Cagle’s protests, he could not get the ad okayed. Short on time, late in the campaign, Cagle appealed to the publisher. Ok, said the publisher, I’ll have someone else look at it. The second one to check it out said to change one word and the ad would be fine.

Turns out that after the election the first guy who would not approve the ad, the newspaper’s advertising director, shows up in Bishop’s campaign finance reports as a paid consultant to the Bishop campaign. One version of the story I heard had Cagle wondering why Bishop’s newspaper ads responded so quickly to Cagle’s, sometimes in the same issue.

A story as interesting as this makes the rounds. Would Bishop mind this story being passed along? “Are you kidding?” a lobbyist said. “He would be proud of it. Proud that he thought of it.”

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