Kos knew what he was talking about, way back in March when he dubbed one of the candidates for the Democratic nomination in NY's 26th congressional district race "Crazy Jack Davis". Despite the fact that we have a great candidate to support in Jon Powers, two-time loser Jack Davis feels he should be able to buy this seat. Well, this weekend the traditional media finally noticed something we've known all along: Jack Davis and reality have no connection to each other. The Buffalo News front-paged a story about Davis releasing his inner Tom Tancredo.
Jack Davis wants to "represent" a district close to the Canadian border, but he is only running on three issues, and one of them is illegal immigration in the Southwest. According to Jack, the Mexicans are going to take over southwestern states and cause another American civil war. The Buffalo News headline for their story was a thing of beauty, as it told readers everything they need to know in a glance:
Davis warns of a new civil war with Southern states. Candidate for the 26th Congressional district see possibility of secession due to Mexican immigrants.
This article covers a speech Davis made, claiming that "Our country has been invaded, occupied and settled by 10 million illegal aliens." He proposed a bold solution to the problem: "I think building a double wall along the southern border is the least expensive long-term solution to maintaining the heritage of our fathers." The thing is, he made this speech during the winter, before the traditional media was paying attention. The blogosphere noticed, though, and Robert Harding, who is indefatigable at the Albany Project and an occasional diarist here at Kos, posted a a YouTube video of the speech way back in April. It may have taken 5 months and a nudge from the Powers campaign, but the Buffalo News finally woke up.
Besides showing that Crazy Jack Davis harbors borderline paranoid delusions, this will be very harmful to him because this district has a lot of rural territory. Farming is one of the main industries in this area, and I know it's the biggest business in my county (Livingston); it may well be in others, especially Wyoming, Genesee, and Orleans. The thing is, these are all family farms, not agribusiness giants. No one is getting rich or collecting crop subsidies out here. They are milking cows and growing apples and the like, and it is difficult, not very profitable work. The only way these farms survive is by using immigrant labor. Most of these workers are legal, and the farmers know how much they need them. Dairy farmers, in particular, simply cannot get native-born people to take jobs on their farms. Davis is very dismissive of their needs. The last few lines of the Buffalo News article show Davis as the sensitive guy he really is.
After hearing quotes from Davis' speech, John Lincoln, the president of the New York Farms Bureau, said "The farmers overall would be really concerned about his statement."
Told what Lincoln said, Davis replied: "He's not a regular farmer. He's one of these big guys ... I'd call him a multinational farmer."
Lincoln, 70, is a dairy farmer with 200 head of cattle in Bloomfield, a village of 1,258 in Ontario County, southeast of Rochester. Asked if he had ever met Lincoln, Davis said he had not.
Compounding the self-inflicted damage for Davis is the fact that this is an issue uppermost in farmers' minds right now. There were some highly publicized immigration raids in this area last year, and migrants (legal and illegal) simply started avoiding western New York. Apples rotted unpicked, because there weren't enough people to harvest them. And dairy farmers know that immigrant workers may be the only thing that keeps them afloat.
I've written about Jack Davis before, as his Supreme Court case striking down the Millionaires' Amendment may cause the death of public financing systems. That's personal to me, as my main takeaway lesson from running for Assembly last cycle is that the only chance we have at cleaning up Albany is a Clean Money Clean Election system. Well, guess what? This is personal to me as well, as my professional training is as an historian (thus the "Historical Pessimist" username). My research for my degree was all about nativism, the anti-immigrant movement that was very strong in the 19th century. And here is someone who claims to be from my party helping to make my dusty old research relevant, and not in a good way.
So I am happy to have been working hard for Jon Powers for a long time. (My group knocked on 280 doors this weekend.) But it's coming down to the wire, as the primary in this race is September 9, and Jack is carpet bombing the mail and tv with self-promotion. Powers is an Orange to Blue candidate who is just the kind of representative our district needs. Please help if you can. We've been stuck with "representatives" for the last generation (Reynolds, Paxson, Kemp) whose main priority has been the health of the Republican party, while the health of this district has gotten ever more precarious. Powers will represent the whole district, not just part of it. We deserve Jon Powers, so I hope you can pitch in.