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View Full Version : Race barriers remain in post-Obama South




bobbyw24
12-10-2009, 06:40 AM
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 complicated 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.

Read on

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30427.html