An early commentator on the senate was an English chap named Gibbon. He said the success of the nation he studied rested on the strength and discipline of its military, a wealthy urban society and a religiously tolerant and open-minded culture.

This Gibbon was, of course, Edward Gibbon, who was writing in the year of our nation’s formation. The senate he refers to in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is the Roman senate.

In the book, he first describes how the senate was a body designed to modify and temper the raw will of the people. It was a gaggle of rich men who tended to the government with care — until they were later corrupted by money and power.

So what do the ancient Roman senate and its downfall have to do with the senior senator from Alabama, the Hon. Thomas Hawley Tuberville? Everything. Tuberville — the U.S. senator known as “Coach” — shows us that some things never change.

Coach is not a latter-day Brutus who can be expected to stab President Joe Biden to death in the well of the Senate. Nor is he a rich landowner who had to pay to get his seat, as was done in ancient Rome. But how did a football coach with name recognition and little else to recommend him achieve high office?

Start with the old Roman epigram, Pecunia non olet. “Money does not smell.” More to the point, money is good regardless of where it comes from. The money to elect Coach came from conservatives who needed him to parrot their lines and legitimate their positions. They are dedicated to keeping a guy like him elected.

Who else would call “patriots” those men and woman who declare themselves white nationalists? Coach did. In what he (or his handlers) would qualify as “flexibility of mind,” Coach has now reversed himself and proclaimed that “White nationalists are racists.”

The magazine Rolling Stone laid it on Coach pretty heavy, saying: “The Alabama senator’s recent comments indicate he’s either extremely dumb, extremely racist, or both.”

Now, I ask you: Does Coach care what Rolling Stone says about him? Do his supporters care? Not for a nano-second. The fact that a person in power is stupid, uneducated, unaware and unwilling to think about anything other than saying whatever he thinks it takes to stay in office is nothing new. Plenty of smart politicians have said stupid things to keep their base happy. Coach’s remarks about how he calls white nationalists “Americans” will garner lots of points in Alabama.

His are not the dumb gaffes that any person whose every word is recorded is bound to make. There are plenty of those: “Trees cause more pollution that automobiles.” — Ronald Reagan

“Life in indeed precious, and I believe the death penalty helps to affirm that fact.” — Ed Koch

“If Lincoln were alive today, he’d be turning over in his grave.” — Gerald Ford

“I took the initiative in creating the internet.” — Al Gore

“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” — Richard Nixon

And I won’t even mention all the George W. Bush-isms or comment on Bill Clinton’s insistence that “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

When I was a teenager, my brother and I had an unforgettable high school teacher. His name was Mr. Hemby. He was a football coach who was attempting to teach history. Besides his proclivity for identifying our nation as the “Newnited States,” he regularly held forth on the various ethnic groups that inhabit parts of Texas, as in: “You got your Mexicans, your Czechs, your Germans and your Polacks.”

I’m pretty sure he didn’t know the distinction between Poles and the slur “Polacks.”

Not all coaches are dumb — not by a long shot. Nick Saban is driven and brilliant. No one would call Bill Belichick stupid. Ditto for Sean Payton and a lot of the men and women who are coaching sports all across the country.

However, just because you’re smart enough to coach football does not mean you’re prepared to be a U.S. senator.

Poor Mr. Hemby was tasked with teaching history. He was a modest man, with much to be modest about. But like another coach/teacher I know of who characterized Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” as “nothing but a little ol’ story,” he was just plain dumb. So, too, is our Coach.

Tommy Tuberville is not dangerous because he is unfit by intellect, experience, judgment, character and skill to be a senator. He is unfit because he seems willing to say or do anything to stay in power. Republican president wants his own Praetorian Guard? I think he’d go for it. No more pesky elections? He’d probably be for that, too.

The problem is, Coach doesn’t even know what a hazard he is. But as master politician and Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte said, “Stupidity in politics is not a handicap.”

He sure got that right, didn’t he, Coach?

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.