I walked into Café 615 that evening with a little thrill of anticipation. Being so involved in the political process was still new to me and I hadn’t been face-to-face with many “real live” political leaders, at least not those who had a voice on the national stage. The room began to buzz quietly as the Congressman entered the room, a handsome African American man who’d begun to make a name for himself and our state. In recent months I’d seen him speak before a packed house at the Democratic National Convention, watched him handle himself ably with national reporters. And now I was about to shake his hand.
If his eyes continued to scan the room as he spoke to me, looking for who else he should speak to rather than focusing for a moment on the lowly volunteer smiling at him, I shrugged it off. He was a busy man with a lot of people to greet. The whispers and excitement continued to grow as he worked the room. “He may be offered a job in Obama’s cabinet if he wins the election.” “I hear he may be running for Governor in a few years.” “He’s going to do so much for Alabama.”
As he began to speak, I picked up my phone to video tape his words. I could be listening to the next governor of Alabama. I wanted to be able to look back and say I knew him when.
A few days ago, I dug out that old piece of video, but not in happy remembrance. Congressman Artur Davis did not become a member of President Obama's cabinet, nor did he become Alabama's first black governor. And the best thing he ever did for Alabama was leave it.
Next week, if his speech isn't cut from the hurricane-shortened program, Artur Davis will step on stage at the Republican National Convention and endorse Mitt Romney for President. I went looking for the video I took because I remembered vaguely that he'd spent time that night discussing the philosophical difference between Democrats and Republicans and I was intensely curious to revisit what he'd said then in light of what he was saying now.
Follow me below the fancy waffle to see for yourself...
Mr. Davis spoke passionately that night about the fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. His argument then? We are a party that cares about people and what happens to them. If we err, we want to err by helping too many than leaving people out in the cold.
I’m a Democrat because I remember what Franklin Roosevelt said a long time ago. ... “Governments do err, and Presidents do make mistakes, but I would rather have the occasional errors of a government acting in the warm spirit of goodness and charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
What he was saying was we don’t offer a perfect way, but we offer a way that errs on the side of lifting people up. So every now and then do we lift up too many people? Sure, probably we do. But the bottom line is I would rather be in a party and a philosophy and a political faith that believes too much in the idea of us being one country than being the opposite of who we are. A party that doesn’t believe we belong to each other, a party that doesn’t believe we’re sewn together, and a party that thinks division is the quickest way to get to 50 plus 1. I would rather be us than them.
Of course, that was then and this is now. Then he was an up-and-coming centrist Democrat from the South. Now he's a born-again Republican, being interviewed on Fox News where he's becoming a go-to spokesman, writing essays for The National Review denouncing President Obama's policies and speaking to cheering crowds of Tea Partiers -- where he praised them over the early civil rights pioneers who made his own career possible:
My kinfolk from the South in the civil rights movement changed the country, but not even the civil rights movement figured out how to win elections and turn a country around as quickly as you did.
So many people on the side that I used to work with, they look at the tea party and they see people out of touch with this country. You're not what's wrong with this country. You are what is right about this country, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
So was he lying back in 2008 or is he lying now? According to
Craig Ford, D-Gadsden, Alabama House Minority Leader:
In defeat, we have seen the real Artur Davis -- a man with no principles, and no understanding of what it means to be a statesman and public servant. ... Artur Davis has built his career on cutting back-room deals with Republican-backed business groups and telling lies about those who opposed him. He turned his back on the people who he was once elected to represent because the only person Artur Davis has ever truly been interested in helping was himself.
Now the people in Alabama and Virginia understand what the political circles in Montgomery and Washington, D.C. have been saying for years about him – that Artur Davis has no principles, and will say anything to advance his own career.
Republicans have made (or tried to make) a lot of political hay over his about-face. They want desperately to turn him into a poster child for their narrative of the failure of Obama's leadership, someone to whom they can point and say, "See? Obama is so extreme even black Democrats are turning away from him."
The truth, of course, is that Artur Davis is just a symbol of his own failure of leadership, primarily a failed gubernatorial campaign that took for granted his party's base and bought into the Republican fallacy that black voters care more about the skin color of their candidates than their policies. Davis' failure was so complete that it effectively ended his political career in Alabama, and as a Democrat. If he wanted to continue in politics, his only option was to reinvent himself completely. Davis did so, of course, by moving to Virginia and, not just becoming a Republican, but embracing the extreme far right wing of the party.
Artur Davis is a political opportunist. Like the Presidential Candidate he now supports, his policies are contingent on political expediency far more so than any true belief. The Republicans who hear him speak next week would do well to remember that.
7:35 PM PT: Updated to add poll