Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) is in the fight of his political life. Bachus is perhaps best known nationally because of the recent 60 Minutes piece about congressional “insider trading” and the related upcoming ethics investigation. Challenging him is Alabama state Senator Scott Beason, probably best known for sponsoring Alabama’s toughest-in-the-nation anti-illegal immigration law.
If Bachus retains his seat after "Deep South Super Tuesday" primary in Alabama, it’s going to be because of numbers. He’s been forced to spend over a million of them in defensive media buys.
And if he loses, it’s going to be about numbers, too.
I’ll explain.
The first number we’ll talk about is 72, as that’s the percent of Americans who feel that government officials should be banned from trading stocks while in office, according to a recent Rasmussen poll. Next, there’s the number two - twice. The National Journal found that Bachus had the second most liberal voting record of Alabama’s congressional delegation last year. These numbers won’t mesh well with voters in one of the countries two most conservative districts.
Three is the number of terms Bachus promised he’d serve in Congress back when he supported term limits. He’s now been there for twenty years.
Moving on to bigger numbers, there is the $700 billion TARP bailout which Bachus supported. Although he acknowledged that voters in his district opposed the bill, he referred to it as the “gift which keeps on giving.” Those gifts contain a whole lot of numbers. 89 percent is one of those numbers, which is the percent of contributions raised from outside of his district from these industries: commercial banks, insurance, securities and investment, real estate and miscellaneous finance.
These donations add up to another number, $3.7 million, which is the amount the Campaign for Primary Accountability Super PAC claims the financial services sector has added to Bachus’ war chest.
These numbers should come as no surprise, as Bachus once told The Birmingham News that in DC “the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”
The Super PAC is also claiming that Bachus teamed up with Maxine Waters to forgive loans to 24 countries. Beason claims that Bachus teamed up with Barack Obama to send an additional $845 billion to the United Nations.
There’s the reported $3 billion that Bachus supported spending on Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program, but that’s been such a mess we’ll probably never find out what the real number is. And there’s a big granddaddy of a number, too. Eight is the number of times he’s voted to raise the national debt, for a whopping total of nearly $7 trillion.
Of course, Beason has his numbers, too. There’s the $1.2 billion he saved Alabamians by fighting the GOP establishment’s proposed tax increase in 2003. He probably saved Jefferson County, Alabama residents around $75 million per year by single-handedly stopping another tax increase, too.
Another nice number is the amount of new jobs which have been created since Beason’s immigration bill went into effect: 35,400. Following the implementation of the new law, the drop in Alabama’s unemployment rate has outpaced neighboring states and is most pronounced in counties which had the highest number of illegal immigrants.
There are many additional numbers at play here, too. There is the number of ads the Super PAC is running against Bachus every day and the number of boots Beason supporters have been able to put on the ground. There is the number of robocalls coming out from each campaign as well as the number of times each day that Beason is trashed by the liberal media.
They say that numbers don’t lie.
And I’ve provided a number of reasons why this country will be better off if Scott Beason is elected to Congress.