The biographer Robert Caro says that power reveals. Power lets you do what you want. And your desires show who you are.

After four years in the U.S. Senate, we have few doubts about what Tommy Tuberville wants.

A man sent to Washington to represent Alabama spends a lot of time on television talking about President Donald Trump or his enemies. Alabama is a peripheral concern. In some cases, Tuberville takes positions that are demonstrably bad for the people here.

When he’s not ignoring Alabamians, he’s embarrassing them. Tuberville in 2022 made an overtly racist assertion that Black Americans are criminals at a rally in Nevada. He also took a very long time to acknowledge that white nationalists are racists.

And Tuberville appears to despise transgender people. He attacked a Space Camp employee — a private citizen — because that person was transgender. He thinks, falsely, that men somehow got into the women’s boxing events at the 2024 Olympics.

Tuberville blocked military promotions for almost a year because the Biden administration wanted to help enlisted women access health care. He compared Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator and California attorney general, to a “crazy ex-girlfriend.” When U.S. Sen. Katie Britt — his Republican colleague; an experienced politico and a former leader of Alabama’s largest business group — bombed her State of the Union response last year, Tuberville said she had been “picked as a housewife.”

Also, he forgot that triangles exist.

And all of that is before we get to questions about whether Tuberville actually lives in Alabama; possible conflicts of interest in his stock trading and questions about one of his charities.

This is the guy who’s going to clear the gubernatorial field?

He might. Tuberville appears to be edging into next year’s race for governor. And Republicans seem ready to give way to him. Even the suggestion that Tuberville could run led Agriculture and Industries Commissioner Rick Pate to give up plans to run for the office.

The senator would, of course, be a strong candidate. Tuberville has name recognition and a record that appeals to hard core Republican primary voters.

As a sitting senator, he should raise money easily. Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, another possible gubernatorial candidate, had $1.3 million in his campaign account in January compared to Tuberville’s $628,000 in March. But Ainsworth will need to spend all that and more to reach Tuberville’s levels of notoriety.

There’s no doubt the senator could be our next governor.

But why does Tuberville want to be governor?

“If you’re the CEO of a state then you can help more in a certain amount of time,” Tuberville told Alabama Daily News in March.

Oh boy.

The Legislature, not the governor, holds the power in Alabama. The governor can do little more than make suggestions to lawmakers and sign the bills sent to her desk. If she vetoes a bill during the session, the Legislature can override her with a majority vote. She has a more effective pocket veto near the end of a session, but lawmakers can work around it.

If you want to be a successful chief executive in Alabama, you must know the boundaries of the office. Occasionally you get a George Wallace with enough loyalty from voters to bend legislators to his will.

More often, Alabama governors must work outside the Legislature to appear strong. This means doing things that don’t directly involve the Legislature. Like immediate response to natural disasters. Or recruiting companies to the state.

Bob Riley did both to project decisiveness even as a Democratic-controlled Legislature controlled the purse strings. So does Kay Ivey, who understands where she has leverage and where she doesn’t.

Robert Bentley also used that combination. But he wasted it in pointless confrontations with legislators, overestimating his power and showing the weakness of the office.

Let’s hope a Gov. Tuberville does not end his career the way Bentley did. There will be plenty of ideological overlap between Tuberville and a (likely) Republican-controlled Legislature.

But Tuberville’s habit of running his mouth and alienating people without forethought doesn’t bode well. In the inevitable moments when the governor clashes with lawmakers, the chief executive needs to know what the office can and can’t do. And try to get a good result and escape the fray with as much dignity as possible.

One can’t assume a man who speaks like an uncle’s Facebook post has that subtle touch. If Trump gets his way on the economy and disaster aid, Tuberville will have fewer avenues to show leadership. And if a Gov. Tuberville talks to lawmakers like Sen. Tuberville treats his constituents, he will quickly learn who holds the cards.

But really, he shouldn’t be sitting at the table. Power has revealed Tuberville to be shallow, spiteful and more interested in attention than the state he represents. He treats most Alabamians with contempt and views his job as an annex to a television career.

And if Alabama voters, knowing all that, elevate him to another political office, what does that reveal about us?

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

Whenever Alabama’s senior U.S. senator makes a statement, I usually have one reaction.

Has Tommy Tuberville thought this through?

It’s rare to see evidence that he has on anything he shares his opinions on. The senator seems like an old player piano, mechanically striking the notes of whatever melody Fox News or Newsmax feeds him.

So Tuberville plays the latest hit among the right-wing set, “California Must Do What We Say.”

But I don’t think the senator understands where this song ends.

As you know, southern California is reeling from wildfires. They’ve killed dozens of people; destroyed tens of thousands of homes and done hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage.

Much of the congressional GOP, including the leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, want to withhold aid until California, a Democratic-leaning state, agrees to take dictation from Republicans like Tuberville about how to run things.

A lot of this comes from misunderstandings of what’s actually happening in the Golden State, particularly when it comes to water and forest management.

But this is an age where the truth of an assertion matters less than the blunt force it generates.

“They got 40 million people in this state, and (they’re) voting these imbeciles into office,” Tuberville said of California on Newsmax last week.

The senator then added something about Republicans in California — who he identified as the “good people” in the state — being “overwhelmed by these inner-city woke policies.” He added that California doesn’t “deserve anything to be honest with you unless they show us they’re going to make some changes.”

This is the part of the commentary where one would traditionally sigh and ask you to imagine any other politician saying something so ugly, selfish and heartless during a crisis.

But Tuberville is the only politician I can imagine saying this. Other Republicans share the senator’s views. But the blend of racial dog whistles; ungrounded assumptions and unsolicited policy prescriptions — that’s all Coach Pine Box.

It’s also short-sighted. Alabama always encounters disasters, whether natural or human-made.

Like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. I worked in Mobile at the time and remember the gnawing sense of dread over the month it took for that plume in the Gulf of Mexico to crash onto the Alabama shore.

But even before the first tar balls washed up in Bayou La Batre, the tourism season was wrecked. The fishing industry was grounded. People lost their livelihoods in the depths of the worst economic recession in living memory.

The next year there were devastating tornadoes that killed over 250 people in the state and left large swaths of central Alabama in ruins. Tuscaloosa looked like it had been bombed.

And each time, there was federal help. The government provided aid to victims of the oil spill and later secured a $18.7 billion settlement with BP over the destruction (though Alabama leaders spent a lot of the state’s share on paying debts and shoring up state budgets, not the coast). Federal aid came in after the 2011 tornadoes. And for countless disasters since, from the deadly Beauregard tornado in 2019 to a devastating hail storm in Camp Hill in 2023.

No one dreamed of holding that assistance back for political purposes. Americans were hurting; their government moved to help them.

But now Tuberville wants to create a world where compassion is conditional.

What would that look like?

California would have to surrender its sovereignty to a man who took months to say that white nationalism is racism.

And Alabama? What would stop a future Congress from tying strings to aid meant for us?

Oh, you had a hurricane? We’re very sorry. Hey, ever notice that Alabama ranks 24th among the states in population but 15th in carbon emissions? When your utilities cut back on fossil fuel consumption, we’ll let you rebuild your roads.

Woof, those tornadoes did a number on those businesses in your district, huh? Would love you to have these small business loans. But we can’t release them until your state leaders repeal your anti-union laws.

Drought, huh? Yeah man, farming’s rough. Anyway, stop making it hard for Alabamians to vote.

This outcome may tempt you. The federal government is almost always responsible for Alabama becoming more humane. But you’d force a lot of Alabamians into pointless suffering. It would be a disgrace.

You know, like Tuberville scolding Californians crawling through the ashes of their homes.

Still, if the GOP wants to establish that precedent, it’s hard to see future Congresses abandoning it.

That’s where this ugly song about holding aid hostage ends: in a tone-deaf crescendo where an allegedly conservative senator increases the power of the federal government; where the victims of nature’s wrath — in California or Alabama — suffer far longer than they should.

Maybe Tuberville hasn’t thought that through. The rest of us should worry about living in a world where politics take precedence over human decency.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.