Kay Ivey insists she's too busy being governor to debate her Republican challengers. Instead, she's taking her message directly to the people of Alabama, 30 seconds at a time, in paid political advertising that conveys the warmth and charm of a woman who will poison your dog if it gets in her yard again.

This isn't the Ivey we thought we knew a year ago when we traded in one governor for another.

In a new TV spot dropping this week, Ivey begins by blasting Washington, political correctness, special interests and other straw men long ago shredded into cow feed. It's when the ad turns to specifics that we learn what this talk radio MadLib is really about.

"When special interests wanted to tear down our monuments, I said no, and signed a law to protect them," Ivey says.

The ad smells of polling and focus groups. Someone in her campaign decided Ivey needed a knock-out blow -- to finish off her GOP challengers and avoid a runoff altogether. They needed an issue. But in Ivey's brief tenure in the governor's office, this is what counts for a monumental achievement: Signing a bill passed by the Legislature.

But for the Ivey we meet in this campaign spot, this isn't grandstanding. It's a teachable moment.

"We can't change or erase our history, but here in Alabama, we know something Washington doesn't," Ivey says. "To get where we're going means understanding where we've been."

I don't know whether this is the real Ivey or one manufactured by campaign consultants. The governor has declined our invitations to sit for an extended interview, so we may never know.

But real or phony, this is the Ivey we've got. And not only does she get history wrong, but she doesn't have a good handle on the present, either.

Already Ivey's law has created problems for the state. Last year, the Department of Corrections sought to rename the Frank Lee Youth Center the Frank Lee Community Based Facility and Community Work Center because -- well, it's now a community work center.

But Alabama Attorney Steve Marshall says in a formal opinion his office issued last year that even that goes too far because the building is more than 40 years old.

But if that's the silly consequence of Ivey's law, let's turn our attention to the serious, and consider just who these "special interests" are to whom she refers in her ad.

In 2017, it wasn't overbearing liberals from Washington who considered moving a monument in Birmingham's Linn Park. It was the Birmingham City Council.

Council members demanded then-Mayor William Bell knock down a memorial to Confederate soldiers and sailors erected in 1905. Bell took an intermediate step to let tempers cool and prudence prevail -- he had city crews build a plywood partition around the obelisk until he could come up with a plan to satisfy everyone (or at least get him past last year's election).

However, where Bell looked for a third way, the Alabama attorney general said it was Kay's way or no way. Marshall sued the city and threatened to fine Birmingham $25,000 for each day the barrier stood. Today that fine would be more than $6 million.

Bell lost the election, and now it's up to Mayor Randall Woodfin's administration to defend the plywood wall. But where Bell's approach was conciliatory, Woodfin's administration is, as the kids say, woke AF.

"Over the course of this litigation, the Act initially presented as a (purportedly) facially-neutral prohibition in the interest of historical preservation, has drastically morphed into the State of Alabama's unwavering endorsement of a position which affords more protection to the ideals expressed by Confederate loyalists in 1905, than the State is willing to afford to the ideals of Alabama's citizens and municipalities existing and operating today," the city lawyers wrote in a recent brief.

"The Attorney General's argument is a blatant proclamation of the State's intent to exercise control over any opposition to the prominent display of relics that honor Alabama's open conflict as an enemy to the United States of America, and that mourn the Confederacy's "lost cause" to operate as a separate and independent nation that fosters the enslavement of African-Americans."

The city's legal arguments are multifaceted, but it does not flinch from an ugly truth. The "special interests" Ivey blasts in her ad?

Black people. We're talking about black people.

Specifically, black majorities in major cities who feel uncomfortable with their public spaces celebrating their ancestors' kidnapping, enslavement, torture and murder.

But instead of respecting these local governments as sovereign entities, Ivey and all those who voted for her bill carry on the racist paternalism that's older than those marble men and concrete columns.

We can't change or erase our history, Ivey says, but that isn't true. We whitewashed over our history the moment Reconstruction ended.

And Ivey is here to assure you she's ready, with a bucket and pail, to freshen things up with another coat of cheap paint.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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