Race barriers remain in post-Obama South

After last year’s historic presidential campaign, a new season of opportunity seemed at hand for African-American candidates in the South. Not only had a black man been elected president, he had carried Virginia and North Carolina along the way.

But Dixie is slow to yield its traditions and paradoxes, as Rep. Artur Davis is finding as he tries to fashion an Obama-style cross-racial coalition in his bid to become Alabama’s first black governor.

If anything, Davis, a Democrat, is finding it may be more complicated than ever for African-Americans to win statewide races in the Deep South. In today’s political landscape, it’s not just old-style prejudice that must be overcome but also a more complicated stew of long-simmering personal grievances, generational tensions and intraracial rivalries.

Never a favorite of the state’s Democratic establishment, Davis has come under fierce attack from Joe Reed — for years the most influential African-American in Alabama politics — for being the only black House member to oppose health care legislation. Reed savaged Davis as a political opportunist who opposed the bill to curry favor with the state’s conservative-leaning white majority.

Davis’s vote showed that “because he is now running for governor, he is looking out for himself and not the people,” Reed wrote in the newsletter of the influential Alabama Education Association, where he’s a top official. He added: “You cannot curse Bubba and Cooter, Big Man and June Bug in the daytime and beg them at night.”

Davis shot back this week that Reed “believes that a public official’s race matters more than his capacity for independent judgment.”

“He believes that a black American who holds elected office must follow a certain path or be inauthentic,” wrote Davis in a statement.

The sniping continued. Reed, noting that he had helped create the black-majority district that Davis represents, retorted that he had been registering voters and helping candidates “when Congressman Davis was making mud cakes under the shade tree.”

The exchange vividly illustrates Davis’s multilayered challenge in breaking the political color line of the Deep South, where no African-American has been elected governor or senator since Reconstruction. (African-Americans have had more success in border-state Virginia, where L. Douglas Wilder was elected governor in 1989.)

Running in a state where just 10 percent of white voters supported President Barack Obama last year, Davis cannot win unless he makes deep inroads with Alabamians who supported John McCain and don’t like the president.

By voting no on health care reform and then taking after the embodiment of the state’s black old guard, Davis sent an unmistakable message that he’s not a conventional African-American politician.

Yet when he takes steps to distance himself from the White House and his national party, he will be given no quarter from the likes of Reed, which could dampen enthusiasm for Davis among the blacks he needs to turn out in high numbers to have a chance to win.

Davis won’t say so directly, but the sniping he’s getting from old guard blacks could bolster him next year among both blacks and whites, in the same way that Obama was helped by distancing himself from traditional African-American leaders.

But to even get to the general election, first he’ll have to navigate a primary that underlines the thicketlike complexity of Democratic politics in Alabama.

For instance: A white man — the state’s leading trial lawyer and a former lieutenant governor under George Wallace — prefers Davis over his white opponent. At the same time, he is urging a pillar of the state’s Democratic establishment — a black man who is widely seen as preferring Davis’s white primary opponent — to avoid injecting race-baiting rhetoric into the campaign.

“Anybody who is trying to make race an issue is making a tragic mistake,” said Jere Beasley, the trial lawyer, alluding to but not naming Reed, the longtime black Democratic power broker.

Reed, 72, and Davis, 42, have clashed ever since the congressman first ran in a primary against Rep. Earl Hilliard, another member of the state’s African-American old guard. After losing in 2000, Davis knocked off Hilliard to capture the seat in 2002. Both races were heated and suffused with racial tensions.

In an interview, Davis complained that Reed “has a tendency to inject race into every political debate under the sun.”

But in Alabama, race is inescapable, woven into the fabric of the political culture.

As Davis pointedly noted in his statement earlier this week, Reed supported Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential primary out of concern that an African-American couldn’t win the presidency.

Davis, by contrast, was an early supporter of Obama’s.

Now, Reed and some other members of the party’s establishment, black and white, are supporting or leaning toward Davis’s white primary opponent, Ron Sparks, the state’s agriculture commissioner, out of the same nagging concern over viability.

It strikes some as political déjà vu.

“I think that he believes he can thread the same needle that Obama threaded,” Jennifer E. Duffy, senior editor at The Cook Political Report, said of Davis. “The difference is in the degree of difficulty. Alabama is not a microcosm of America. There are no deeply ‘blue’ parts.”

But there could be lessons for Davis from Obama’s success.

For then-candidate Obama, keeping Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and much of the rest of the old civil rights establishment at arms’ length proved smart, as it signaled to voters a break from identity politics.

Davis, who met the future president while both were at Harvard Law School, said he is taking the Obama route in one important way — trusting the voters are ready to break habits of the past.

“Barack Obama trusted the country,” he said.

But Davis is going a step further than Obama did by happily engaging with the old guard and highlighting his differences.

“Reed is a capable advocate for the African-American wing of the Democratic party ... that’s the role he has chosen to play, the leader of one faction, [but] that’s not a role that I have chosen,” Davis said.

Reed was out of the country and could not be reached for an interview. Beyond health care and race, Davis is trying to separate himself from the Democratic pack and Obama by staking out moderate positions on other issues, like cap and trade, legislation that he voted against and that could help him in the state’s business community.

Yet as extraordinary as Obama’s victory was last year, Davis’s task in 2010 could be even harder.

Even as Obama won Virginia and North Carolina, both fluid states with many transient new voters, he didn’t even contest Alabama.

Davis, though, called the idea that whites won’t vote for another black man, because they didn’t vote for Obama, “demeaning.”

“If I lose this campaign, it won’t be because I am black; it will be because I didn’t articulate a strong enough case and didn’t raise enough money,” Davis said.

Davis’s advisers, while careful to not criticize the president, get frustrated at the comparison and point out that the congressman is a different sort of Democrat.

“Throughout his career in the House, he’s shown his independence,” said Jessica Vanden Berg, a senior Davis adviser. “He has voted in a way that reflects Alabama as a whole.”

Further, notes the Davis camp, the candidate leads in early polls not only in the Democratic primary but against potential GOP opponents as well.

“Race has always been an issue, but I do think there has been some real positive evolution politically in Alabama,” said Joe Turnham, the state’s Democratic Party chairman.

Turnham pointed out that a black Democrat, James Fields, won a state House seat last year in a north Alabama district that is 97 percent white.

But winning in a friends-and-neighbors special legislative election is far different from capturing the 38 percent of white votes Davis is seen as needing to win a general election.

To do that, Davis officials believe tangling with the likes of Reed is less gamble than necessity. They argue that traditional leaders in the black community don’t automatically deliver blocs of votes anymore.

“They get their news from their pastor but also from Internet and TV, so it’s not like there is this controlling mechanism of votes like you used to have,” said a Davis adviser.

However, both state and national Democrats worry that it’s tough enough to win as a black Democrat statewide in Alabama — and perhaps nearly impossible if the party is fractured.

Paul Hubbert, head of the state’s teachers union and one of the party’s traditional power brokers, said that Obama’s victory has represented a mixed blessing for Alabama Democrats.

“It has energized blacks but also energized white conservatives,” said Hubbert, who is close to Reed and whose union has contributed to Sparks.

Story by Politico's Nia Malika Henderson & Johnathan Martin

I've always thought a Black Democrat has a much better chance of becoming governor of a deep southern state like Georgia than any other. Artur Davis right now id leading Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks for the democratic nomination, but once it is time to go to the polls, will Davis hold on to his lead. If he is tied to Obama in any way, he's finished.

Just like here in Georgia, where we have Attorey General Thurbert Baker & Ray City Mayor Carl Camon both running for governor, RJ Hadley, who is trying to become the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since post civil war reconstruction. Baker & Camon are not tied to the president in anyway, remember Baker endorsed Hillary Clinton & maintained it when everyone else got aboard the Obama Bandwagon. That's why I say Baker has a much better chance of getting elected here that Davis over in Alabama.