TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

The governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, caught using burner cell phones to send dirty text messages to his girlfriend. A top eight in the governor's mansion.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

This was truly a bizarre case. Ladies and gentlemen, Governor Robert Bentley, who is head of the government of the great state of Alabama, is in a political crisis. This has been going on for some time since early 2016. The move is still ongoing to impeach him. I don't know if he's going to survive or not, but I can tell you as a public official, it's not a good idea to go to Best Buy and purchase a bunch of burner cell phones that you can use and then toss away as if you were in some CSI program and you're a drug dealer on primetime tv. It's just not a good idea. It's going to catch up with you. Texting in general, whether it's your own phone or a burner phone or somebody else's cell phone to your mistress or your girlfriend when you're already married and you're Republican and you're 73 years old and you're the governor of a state is just not a good idea from a public relations standpoint. Forget the morality of it. It's really not a good idea from a political and public relations standpoint. Standpoint. Now, the governor has contended that he did not have an illicit affair, although his wife has since, I guess, divorced him. He says that nothing sexual in nature has happened. He apparently just likes texting things of a sexual nature to this woman who was his top staffer and additionally made phone calls. And those phone calls were recorded and have since been played out. This was to Rebecca Mason, one of his top political aides. Look, folks, I am a big boy. I know a lot of you are sophisticated. It's not a shocker when two people who work together closely sometimes fall for each other and romances start. It happens in offices all over the world. It's happened in the White House before and it happens in the private sector, the public sector. But not everyone is equal. If you are a mid level accountant at a big accounting firm and you fall for another accountant, chances are maybe nobody cares. Or other than your boss and the spouse is involved, nobody really cares. But when you're the governor of a state and the head of a party that prides itself on traditional moral values, people start to care. And that's the big problem for this governor. We'll talk about how he can possibly rehabilitate himself in just a moment.

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There's always something interesting going on in Alabama. Maybe not as much as Florida, but it's certainly a state with a colorful past, one that I am not necessarily proud to say I'm a part of. But I too had a very wasn't involved directly, but I was certainly there when another big sex scandal was playing out. This was 30 years ago, ladies and gentlemen. It was my very first job out of college, first real job after an internship in New York City. But I was a political aide for the former Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley, who at the time was running for governor against George Wallace, the incumbent. And George Wallace got ill, decided not to run for reelection. Bill Baxley, the lieutenant governor, became the frontrunner. Everything was going well until the lieutenant governor was caught with a woman, not his wife, who happened to be the AP bureau chief. Oh boy, that didn't go over well. Now this was before the days of Gary Hart and before the days of media stakeouts and there having to be a context for, for writing about extramarital affairs. It had been widely assumed about a number of politicians in Alabama and elsewhere that they were big playboys though married. But the unwritten rule with the political media, just as it was in Washington, was you don't write about that sort of thing. There has to be some public context. So here was the context. Back in 85 when I was and 86 when I was living in Alabama, the lieutenant governor who lived in Birmingham would go to Montgomery, the state capitol would check into his condo, send his state trooper with a state car out to get the girlfriend, the AP bureau chief, bring her back. So reporters found out, they did a stakeout in the bushes. They took pictures of lieutenant governor going into his room at a set time, his condo, the car going out, car bringing back, the girlfriend, her going in at a set time, leaving the next day at a set time. So the context for the story was misuse of state vehicle and personnel for non authorized government employees or non government employees. So there was a context for doing the story. Well, let's just say Lieutenant Governor Bill Baxley didn't become Governor Bill Baxley. It was a political nightmare. He didn't quite recover from that. Now Governor Bentley is currently in office. If you're going to have a scandal like this, it's generally better to wait till you're in office than during the campaign. Because if it happens during the campaign, voters can have a quick say. So they can have a quick veto on you and your career if you're already in office. It's not quite that easy because impeachment proceedings are by their very nature difficult, time consuming. You've got political issues involved. As far as does the party in power want to get rid of somebody in their own party? How does that affect their own reelection concerns? So as of the date when I'm recording this at the end of April in 2016, I don't know Governor Bentley's fate, whether he will in fact be impeached. But I do know this. His reputation is in tatters because he kind of just looks like a fool. And that's the bigger problem. You don't have much political clout if everybody is snickering about you behind your back and laughing at you. In some states this could be seen, I guess, as swagger. And I don't mean to be mean, but this guy's a very odd, strange looking duck and over 70. I'm not suggesting people over 70 can't fall in love or have romance, but he certainly doesn't seem like somebody's idea of a big macho player. Again, not that that is something a mitigating factor in any of this, but he just seems like a weird, odd, strange duck. And all this talk about him liking to do essentially dirty texting, it makes him sound more like a 12 year old and not a 72 year old. And that's the part I think that's politically damaging. Will it keep him or will it actually get him impeached? It's too soon to tell about that, but I do think it is profoundly having an impact on his reputation. Politics. Once you're a laughing stock, it's hard to get back to influence again.

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So folks, I don't want to sound holier than thou. I'm not going to lecture this politician or any other politician or public figure or business leader and say to them, don't ever do anything or say anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know. Because if that's really your attitude, to censor every conversation you have with every single person can make you a pretty phony, fake, plastic, synthetic person. However, here's where I draw the line. If you're going to start using sophisticated technology, and let's face it, a telephone these days is a multi million dollar computer. By 1980 standards, any cell phone is a massively sophisticated computer that's tracking data, storing it on the cloud, where it's accessible all over the world. If you're going to do something that involves massively complex technology at that point, I would say don't do anything you wouldn't want the whole world to see. If you make that the standard, I think you're going to find yourself in a lot less or a lot fewer crisis communication situations. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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