Democrats Battle to Replace Wallace : Alabama Candidates Race in Mud

One candidate is riding across the state in an “Alabama Victory Special” train with a replica of the statehouse dome wrapped in chains on a flatbed car to symbolize the “closed government” of the past four years.

Another candidate is running campaign commercials that show a big, fat frog hopping across the screen to the message that: “Being called a liar by Fob James is like being called ugly by a frog.”

A third candidate, who already suffers from a “playboy” image, is being hounded by a scandal involving his alleged use of state cars to transport a woman reporter to and from his apartment.

Mudslinging Out in Open

If Alabamians had harbored hopes that this year’s campaign for governor might set a new tone after the era of Gov. George C. Wallace, they have been sorely disappointed.

“If anything, the name-calling and mudslinging are more out in the open this year,” said Ted Bryant, political correspondent for the Birmingham Post-Herald. “It’s pretty much politics as usual,” he added, echoing a widely held sentiment among the state’s political observers.

There may be good reason for that. The top contenders in Tuesday’s primary--all Democrats--are all well seasoned in the ways of Alabama politics, and, with Wallace permanently removed from the political landscape, the stakes are high. The victor of the gubernatorial contest stands to become the political kingpin of one of the South’s most Democratic states--one that Wallace used as a launching pad for four presidential campaigns.

‘Very Competitive Race’

“That’s the real issue in this campaign--who is going to control the state,” said Margaret Latimer, an Auburn University political scientist. “Every one of these people wants power. It’s a very competitive race and it’s awfully hard to tell who’s going to emerge on top.”

Heading the pack are Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley, a frequent Wallace ally who has strong backing from organized labor and blacks, and Atty. Gen. Charles Graddick, a “law-and-order” candidate who has directed his campaign toward white voters.

A poll conducted last week by an Auburn University research group for the Alabama Journal newspaper showed the two virtually neck and neck, with Baxley taking 29% of the vote and Graddick 27%.

At the time of Wallace’s farewell to politics in April, Baxley was the clear front-runner in most major surveys. But political analysts say his momentum has been slowed by newspaper reports that a state trooper was being used to drive a woman reporter for the Associated Press to and from his Montgomery apartment.

Denied Impropriety

Baxley, whose reputation for drinking and Las Vegas gambling are well known in the state, at first denied any impropriety, then later said the only constituency he had to worry about was his wife. The reporter resigned her job, and a request for an investigation is pending before the State Ethics Commission.

Baxley, 44, a former two-term attorney general, lost a 1978 race for governor and won his present post in 1982. He predicts that he will draw most of the “average workers,” black and white, whom Wallace assembled in a biracial coalition for his 1982 gubernatorial triumph.

But Graddick, a 41-year-old Mobile native now in his eighth year as attorney general, hopes to split the Wallace coalition. “A lot of people assumed Bill Baxley would inherit the Wallace vote,” he said recently. “But we are getting many of them . . . the hard-working, God-fearing people.”

Blacks, however, appear to be turned off by Graddick’s candidacy. “Blacks are afraid that if Charlie Graddick gets in, we’ll be back in the streets fighting police dogs,” said J. L. Chestnut Jr., a prominent black Selma attorney and board chairman of the Alabama New South Coalition, a black political group that has endorsed Baxley.

James Believed Third

In third place behind Baxley and Graddick in most polls is former Gov. Fob James, the only person to win and serve a four-year term in Alabama since Wallace first won the governor’s seat in 1962.

James, 51, is a millionaire businessman and ardent school prayer advocate who campaigned throughout the state in a yellow school bus in 1978 and is now making whistle-stops in the “Alabama Victory Special” train.

James is hoping to pass Graddick to gain a place in the Democratic runoff that will be held June 24 between the two top vote getters if no candidate garners a majority of the primary vote Tuesday. The runoff winner is virtually guaranteed victory in the November general election.

The James-Graddick battle has been particularly contentious. When James accused Graddick of an “outright lie” in his campaigning, Graddick responded with the frog commercial.

Two Other Candidates

There are two other Democratic candidates: George McMillan, 42, a Birmingham lawyer and former lieutenant governor who narrowly lost to Wallace in the 1982 Democratic primary runoff, and Barbara Evans O’Neal, a Bessemer homemaker whose support barely registers in the polls.

McMillan, the only candidate to express sharp criticism of the Wallace years, had hoped to be the top Democratic candidate by this time. But when Wallace bowed out, his once buoyant candidacy steadily lost ground.

Guy Hunt and Doug Carter, the two rivals in the Republican primary, face overwhelming odds in their efforts to become the state’s first GOP governor since the Reconstruction era.