"Rep. Artur Davis, desperate to become the next governor of Alabama, thinks sucking up to the current Republican one will help him," Moulitsas wrote Thursday.
"The Daily Kos is a group of people who don't understand and certainly don't represent Alabama values," Elons said. "So it's no surprise that they would say something as ridiculous as that." Corey Elons, press secretary for U.S. Rep. Artur Davis
There's a weird institutional isolation between activist liberals and the rest of the party establishment. Nothing illustrates that better than people like Artur Davis explicitly running against Daily Kos in his local paper. Artur Davis is one of those powerful figures you don't hear that much about. He's the recruitment chair of the DCCC, a self-described 'centrist', and a New Democrat. He voted for the Bankruptcy Bill and attacked Moveon for criticizing Democrats for voting wrong on the capitulation bill.
Davis's record suggests that he's both friendly to right-wing corporate interests and hostile to economic populism. He voted against net neutrality, introduced the failed free trade deal with the Bush administration and signed the letter to the Presidential candidates asking them to go on Fox News to debate. His foreign policy ideas veer to the neoconservative, as he won his seat in 2002 by beating Earl Hilliard on a pro-Israel platform in a majority minority district, sucking up huge sums of money from AIPAC and overwhelming Hilliard with negative TV ads. Davis is now one of the most AIPAC-friendly legislators out there, and a walking political lesson that it is a very bad idea to vote against a war with Iran. Davis is part of a conservative, business-friendly and AIPAC-friendly black elite political class emerging which gets its muscle from AIPAC and right-wing business interests (the same coalition who brought down Cynthia McKinney and put Hank Johnson in her place). I'm not defending McKinney or Hilliard, who I know very little about, but AIPAC really made its bones of late by destroying these two legislators. It was their primary campaign against their Joe Lieberman, as it were.
There's very little counter to the institutional vessels upon which Davis relies for power and support. He may run for Governor of Alabama, or Senator, though he'll probably get crushed in either contest as his local Chamber of Commerce supporters decide that, while a conservative Democrat is good for a Democratic district, Republican is better statewide. The problem here is deep, and points not just to elites like Davis but also to the extreme lack of political support for African-American progressive candidates. Progressives, and particularly liberal Jews, have a strategic interest in developing resource bases and strategies to help African-American progressives and counter the influence of AIPAC. I had hoped George Soros and Mort Halperin were going to do something, but that hasn't happened yet.
Anyway, Artur Davis is in charge of recruitment for the DCCC. Beware of treating that organization as anything but a vessel for the interests of someone like Davis. When really bad things happen in a Democratic Congress, this is one of the people to look to to tease out just what is going on internally. |
