I will not forget the scum's political PAC bought half a million dollars worth of ads against Roy Moore.. What the heck was a Utah fellow doing meddling in an Alabama election? It was not like the rest of the world wasn't doing their part for him.
@Sighlass Long, long, long before the advent of Roy Moore, we knew a U.S. Senator represented broader state interests than the far more localised interests represented by members of the House, since a state sends only two people to the Senate; and, long before Moore, political parties and interest groups took bigger interest in Senate elections (once the election of the Senate was taken away from state legislatures) because they did have broader national and even international implications than House elections generally did. There was always out-of-state money pouring into one or another Senate campaign on behalf of assorted parties or interests with their eyes on those implications, after the Seventeenth Amendment threw the election of Senators out of the state legislatures and into the general elections. It didn't begin and won't end with Moore.
One of the most once-famous examples I can recall: the re-election campaign of Maine senator Owen Brewster (Republican) in 1952. Brewster faced a GOP primary challenge from Maine governor Frederick C. Payne, who was barely known outside their home state but who turned out to have an unexpected and powerful cross-country patron: Howard Hughes.
Of all the cliches anyone's ever heard about Hughes, one of the truest is that he never forgot an enemy. And in 1952 he was still steamed over Brewster having chaired the fabled Senate hearings into Hughes Aircraft's wartime contracts and concurrent activities, especially when it turned out that Brewster had a particular reason to try taking Hughes down---Brewster was in the hip pocket of Pan American World Airways mastermind Juan Trippe.
Brewster was the major Senate patron for a bill that, had it survived, would have frozen Hughes's Trans World Airlines and other American carriers out of international travel by designating Pan Am the sole legal, official American international airline. Hughes even smelled a Pan Am rat as he prepared to testify before the Brewster hearings: it turned out that what was first dismissed as typical Hughes paranoia was right---Hughes's Washington hotel suite and that of his aide Noah Dietrich, as they prepared for Hughes's testimony, were bugged by Brewster and Trippe.
(Hughes first tried a clever stalling tactic while he gathered information on Brewster's hearings plan: he actually opened talks with Trippe about merging Pan Am and TWA. Trippe fell for it hook, line, and stinker, believing it was nothing more than talking merger between two great airlines, until Hughes broke the talks off on the threshold of the hearings having gathered everything he needed for that side of his defense.)
Hughes prevailed at the hearings, of course; in one of the great ironies of life, Hughes the billionaire actually came across as the little guy who fought City Hall and won. And he waited for his shot at revenge against Brewster, who once had ambitions toward the vice presidency until the Hughes hearings pretty much torpedoed those. When Hughes learned Payne was considering a primary challenge to Brewster, Hughes, according to Dietrich (in Dietrich's memoir
Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes), ordered his people, "Give Payne whatever the hell he needs, and forget the cost." The Payne campaign was infused with $60,000 worth of Hughes money, big money in that time and place, not to mention fully detailed documentation of Brewster's shenanigans involving the Pan Am bill. Payne flattened Brewster in the primary, and Brewster actually resigned his seat in December 1952.
Payne's Senate career lasted only one term and is probably remembered best for two things: 1) His support for a bill that would have outlawed switchblade knives, the bill sponsors thinking it would end gang violence, but when the bill finally became law in 1958 it had the opposite effect: the gangs turned to firearms. 2) His successor representing Maine in the Senate---future vice presidential running mate and presidential candidate Edmund Muskie.
Then, again, it's entirely possible that, if the Seventeenth Amendment had never come to pass, Roy Moore might not even have become a topic in the first place.
