The Tim James gubernatorial campaign was an embarrassment to Alabama.

I’ve been interested in local, state and national politics for as long as I can remember and there are few politicians I actually consider dangerous. Tim James, like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, is one of them.

After a close primary race with Bradley Byrne and Robert Bentley, Tim James was (hopefully) unable to gain enough votes to secure a place in the July run-off election. That outcome will be a relief to many Alabama voters who fear that James would have a good chance of winning the runoff vote.

Tim James is disturbing as a potential governor for three reasons.

First, of all the tough issues facing our state, such as job creation, the budget, corruption in Montgomery, the need for an education lottery and the lack of funding for our public schools, Tim James chose the multi-language drivers test as the subject for his main commercial.

Really, Mr. James?

For the average voter, the only thing that they could associate with Tim James’ gubernatorial campaign was his commercial on this topic. He never released a detailed plan to fix a major issue that faces our state.

Second, due to the national and worldwide attention of his “English-only” agenda, Tim James has hurt Alabama’s reputation as being a tolerant state that wants to bring in businesses from around the world. To foreign car companies such as Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai that have invested billions of dollars in our great state, this commercial was a slap in the face.

The negative publicity Alabama received from media outlets could hurt our potential to convince other foreign industries to invest in this state by establishing a business here, which could hurt Alabama’s potential to create jobs.

Finally, Tim James claimed in his commercial that offering the driver test only in English would save money. Honestly, how much money do you think is being spent to offer that test in different languages? Not much. Not to mention that we would lose federal subsidies for not offering the test in the multi-language format we now have in place. So in the end, Alabama would lose money.

I realize that Tim James’s campaign was probably trying to advertise to the less politically versed crowd with this commercial — which is fine. What he failed to realize is that, while this commercial may have worked fifty years ago, Alabamians just did not want to be seen as prejudiced towards legal immigrants who primarily speak another language.

The bottom line is that Tim James’ message of intolerance simply could not be tolerated by the people of this state. Alabama Republicans stood up as one on June 1st and said, “No, Tim James, you didn’t make sense to me.”

Austin Gaddis is a sophomore majoring in public relations and communication studies.