Kyle Whitmire
The only reason we weren’t late was because we planned for the traffic.
Last week, my colleague John Archibald and I drove to Huntsville for a joint speaking engagement, and we set out a little early in case we hit a cluster. As sure as doomsday — and much more punctual — it met us a few miles south of the Tennessee River bridge.
Traffic stopped for no discernable reason but a clunker stalled by the roadside. Cars backed up for miles. Congestion is common on Alabama’s busiest interstate, and like millions of travelers passing along the road every year, we waited.
And there, beneath a billboard for a gambling addiction helpline, was a message you might have seen already.
“Go Wide I-65,” it said. “Support the Ainsworth Plan.”
Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth hasn’t made any secret that he’d like to be governor someday. Others are rumored to have an interest, too, including Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Attorney General Steve Marshall and Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson.
So far, what has distinguished Ainsworth’s ambitions from those others is an idea: He wants to three-lane I-65 from the Tennessee line to the Gulf of Mexico.
“The idea came from my own personal frustration and thinking why haven’t we already done this?” Ainsworth said when I spoke with him this week.
Ainsworth told me the idea came to him after traveling to Kentucky and back for an Auburn basketball game. Other states had already widened their stretches of the interstate, but not Alabama.
“So then I started asking questions, looking into it, and really it was — I hate to say this — but it was failed leadership in our state, not prioritizing that over the last 20 years.”
After he started touting the idea publicly, support came from people stuck on I-65 and sharing pictures of traffic on social media. Support also came from George Clark, the former head of Manufacture Alabama. He’s the guy who put up the signs before they had even talked about it, Ainsworth said.
“His take was that he thought it was an economic development issue, a business issue, and a commerce thing,” Ainsworth told me. “And just glad to have the support.”
As public works projects go, the idea is simpler than the task. Such a project would cost billions and take years to complete. But it’s simple, needed, and by the responses I’ve heard in casual conversations, popular. It’s the sort of idea a candidate doesn’t have to explain to anybody. People just get it.
Someday down the road, we’ll get into the practicality and price of the Ainsworth Idea. (It should be called an idea, after all. It’s not a plan just yet.) But for now, what I want to focus on is how refreshing it is even to have a big idea, to have someone in Alabama politics who wants to do something with power and authority rather than just sit on it.
There was a time in this state when we had governors who came to campaign seasons and took office with big ideas, not just personal ambitions.
Jim Folsom Jr. recruited Mercedes, paving the way for other car manufacturers to follow.
Don Siegelman set out to create an education lottery. Voters said no and have been regretting it ever since.
Bob Riley tried to reform the regressive tax code, which failed, too, but leaned hard into education reforms, including the Alabama Reading Initiative.
But beginning in 2010, our state’s ambitions began to founder.
Robert Bentley won election by promising he wouldn’t take a paycheck until the state reached full employment. He never saw a dime. Meanwhile, his big idea had to do with a staffer.
Kay Ivey took office after Bentley turned political control of the state over to his love interest and had to plead guilty to crimes. Her greatest accomplishment has been using federal stimulus money to fund the country’s most expensive prison, which will bear her name when it’s done.
Really.
And this billion-dollar prison won’t even fix the crowding in Alabama’s jampacked prisons.
In 20 years we have gone from an education governor to an incarceration governor. And we measure her suitability for office, not by accomplishments, but by how many minutes she can stand without falling down.
Years ago, I mocked Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford’s campaign slogan, “Let’s Do Something!” — mostly for its lack of specificity but also because his something tended to involve bribes. But in state politics today, something would be an improvement over all the nothing we’ve become accustomed to. Whether it’s Ainsworth or someone else, Alabama needs a governor with at least one big idea.
Until then, I-65 traffic isn’t all that has slowed to a crawl.
Alabama is stuck and it needs to move again.
