By Artur Davis, on Thu May 24, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  A decade ago, the Hispanic political community and the gay rights lobby were in a substantially similar position: both with agendas that were largely under radar, far enough off the grid that their cause was neither a rallying point for friends nor a wedge issue for their adversaries. The demands of both groups were mostly inconsequential in a national election.
Adjust the dial to 2012 and both gay rights and immigration have turned into cultural flashpoints. But the fortunes of the respective constituencies have taken sharply divergent paths. By any measure, gay rights advocates are on the rise. A once far-fetched goal of theirs, repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, survived congressional gridlock to become one of the Obama administration’s signature achievements; an even more implausible seeming cause, full-fledged marital status for same-sex couples, has just won the endorsement of the President of the United States and has become a major policy commitment of that president’s party.
 In contrast, Hispanic interest groups are in the midst of a bad run. They are winless at the congressional level in the preceding decade—losing badly in their campaign to open up citizenship opportunities for much of the illegal immigrant population, and failing in a more incremental bid to legalize young undocumented adults who join the military or complete college. During Barack Obama’s term, they have actually lost ground. Alabama and Arizona have passed sharply restrictive laws aimed at making their states all but unlivable for illegal immigrants. The Democratic Party that generally wins Latino votes has been an ambivalent ally, with two major elements of their base, labor unions and African Americans, skeptical of any broad liberalization of immigration laws.
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Artur Davis: Hispanic Losses, Gay Victories
By Artur Davis, on Tue May 22, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET Last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education waded headfirst into the culture wars by terminating one of its bloggers for a column excoriating the black studies discipline and calling for its end. The saga around Naomi Schaeffer Riley has ignited a predictable back-and-forth, from the partly organic, partly organized attack by the left on the original piece, to conservative bloggers who have defended her against political correctness run amuck.
I’m of two minds about the controversy. Most of the assault against Riley does seem like shop-worn viewpoint censorship. As even a liberal critic like Eric Alterman has pointed out, labeling the essay as “hate speech” is a frivolous, overwrought charge, and Alterman is right to recognize that a formal response by the black studies faculty at Northwestern which alludes to past discrimination against black college applicants seemed simultaneously pointless and defensive about the capacities of some of the department’s students—who, of course, are not even all black.
 But the Riley essay does not strike me as the best line of defense for admirers of intellectual candor. It is not exactly an exercise in rhetorical grace: there is a talk-radio style bluntness to its 500 odd words that is dependent on name-calling: “left wing victimization claptrap”, “liberal hackery”, a parting shot that practitioners of black studies should defer to “legitimate scholars”. Substantively, the essay’s thesis, that a Chronicle article exposed an intellectual sloppiness in the black studies field, is overly reliant on examples from three dissertations to make a vastly more far-reaching point. Even if two of the papers seem hopelessly polemical and one of them sounds hopelessly opaque, it’s a stretch to indict an entire discipline on such a thin foundation. The whole thing feels like an impressionistic hit dashed off to meet a deadline.
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Artur Davis: The Blogger and Black Studies
By Artur Davis, on Fri May 18, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET Who knew that Massachusetts provides an opportunity to add a touch of color to the almost all white US Senate?
Who knew that when Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren tailored her professional biography to cultivate ties with people who are “like I am”, she had in mind not left-leaning academics, or advanced degreed professional women, or bankruptcy policy wonks, but Oklahoma Cherokees? There is a rich vein in humor in the Boston Herald’s revelation that Harvard Law School touted the clearly Caucasian Warren as a Native America and that for nine years, Warren listed her ancestry in the same manner in official law school directories.
To be sure, the Warren campaign handled the damage control front with a skilled deflection: Team Warren has professed much outrage over any insinuation that her climb up the academic ladder was lifted by affirmative action (a claim her Republican opponent, incumbent Senator Scott Brown, has not remotely raised) and the New Republic has equated the whole thing with far-right birtherism regarding Barack Obama’s background. It’s a clever dodge that minimizes Warren’s creative accounting of her ancestry while reviving the liberal meme that Republicans have a beef with achievements that don’t belong to white men.
Here’s one hope that Warren doesn’t get away so easily. For all the mirth that has greeted the disclosures, there is a serious thicket of questions here for the professor and an embarrassing glimpse into the East Coast elite liberalism that she represents. One appropriate line of inquiry is whether Warren’s drive to reestablish her Cherokee roots manifested itself in any more tangible outreach to Native Americans in, say, her home-state of Oklahoma, who may not have perused law school association guides. The marginalized young adults in that community would certainly have relished a connected, powerful role model, and it is fair game to press Warren on whether the ethnic pride she described last week ever led her to be that person. And it is equally legitimate to ask whether Warren ever used the Native American identification in any context other than a directory that would have been a primary resource for law school recruiters and head-hunters.
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Artur Davis: Elizabeth Warren, Minority Crusader?
By Artur Davis, on Wed May 16, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET Mark Schmitt has just written a solid critique in the New Republic of the failing political enterprise that is Americans Elect. On this site and elsewhere, I’ve echoed Schmitt’s point that the putatively grassroots organization has turned into little more than a society of well connected K Street/Wall Street donors and establishment types who are steering toward some amorphous “center.” I‘ve also argued that this center is a socially liberal, deficit conscious, selectively pro big business zone that reflects the worldview of any lobbyist-paid lunch table at the Palm or Bobby Vann’s. In other words, less a coherent middle ground than a hodgepodge of views that are already well represented in American discourse, especially at elite levels.
As Schmitt documents, the group has lagged in its audacious plan to elevate a third party presidential candidate. Its goal of securing ballot access in 50 states, which was supposed to have been accomplished last fall, has barely crossed the halfway point. The top contenders in their online virtual primary—Buddy Roemer and an unauthorized rump of Ron Paul diehards– are compiling embarrassingly low numbers that look like single precinct caucus totals. And the veil of indifference about the identity of an eventual candidate has been lifted in favor of a not so covert push for former Comptroller General David Walker, a serious man but one whose flirtations with running have yielded 360 online votes and an occasional Google alert.
 The failure is not surprising: the two occasions in which a third party has genuinely broken through in our politics have involved either a national catastrophe—the Republicans who were born from the disintegration of the country over slavery in the antebellum era—or the galvanizing presence of a charismatic former president, Theodore Roosevelt, who was denied a comeback by his party’s retrograde machine. For all of the angst over our current partisanship, America circa 2012 is not remotely a nation in fundamental disarray, or one whose political institutions are unraveling. The Tea Party on the right has already realigned into what amounts to a populist wing within the Republican Party while Occupy Wall Street on the left has quickly faded into irrelevance and incoherence.
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Artur Davis: Americans Elect, Going, Going, Gone?
By Artur Davis, on Tue May 15, 2012 at 4:30 PM ET [Click here to follow the entire RP Debate]
Jeff Smith’s response to my position is a thoughtful clarification. It deserves the following clarification on my part: first, I do think there is room to criticize the termination of Grenell as a needless concession to anti-gay sentiment on the right; there is also as much room to view it as a legitimate reflex in a campaign that has had a consistent issue with staffers who draw too much attention to themselves (remember the debate coach who was sacked last fall after talking out of school about his role in Romney’s debate prep?). My point is simply that it is a fit subject for debate and not a closed, easy case, and I should have expended the time in making that clear.
Second, on the much broader observation that Jeff makes, I actually agree with his point that those of us who aren’t there on gay marriage have an obligation to ground those criticisms in themes that resonate beyond the evangelical community, and that don’t just reflect animus against one class of citizens. I have made that point in a posting on my own blog, officialarturdavis.com last week. I quote part of my observations below:
“The media-filtered reaction to President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage has been predictable: an undercurrent of exaltation in the newsrooms that have long ceased to think of homosexuality as anything but another form of freedom; cherry-picked evangelical leaders who fit that same media’s expectations of what social conservatism looks and sounds like. To be sure, the networks and cable have brought forth their share of high profile African American ministers and Catholic bishops, but they aren’t the woman in that southern church running a youth group, trying to grapple with how social change shapes fatherless neighborhoods: the preachers and clerics are speaking in the accents of scripture and biblical text, which most Americans are in the custom of preaching not practicing.
It would be a healthy thing if more of the debate featured voices like the woman I described. It would be equally healthy if more conservatives (and frankly, conservatives disagree with each other on this issue, liberals are entirely of one mind) had weighed in not with jibes at Obama’s timing or the sincerity of his original, pre-”evolving” mindset, but with an honest declaration that the argument over gay marriage does not have the same contours today as it did ten years ago. The fight for most Americans going forward is whether the legal future of same sex marriage is determined state by state, with voters and democratic processes deciding this issue, and not by federal judges deploying an elastic construction of the equal protection clause; and secondly, whether sectarian institutions like Catholic adoption agencies will preserve their own freedom of conscience or lose it to public and elite opinion.
While I don’t couch it as a character defect, just a blown tactical opoortunity, Romney did miss a moment last week to make the kind of statement of purpose that Jeff alludes to here, and that I touched on last week, but not in the context of the Washington Post’s hit job. He could have used his speech at a relligious college last weekend to make the point that principled Americans can differ on the definition of marriage; that his reading of the Constitution and his preference for states to decide their own social cultures leads him another way, but that he respects the voices of those who think the issue is a clear-cut matter of justice. He also might have added that conservatives should take comfort from the fact that after decades of marriage attracting some cultural derision in smart, chic circles, its a good thing that the institution is being embraced by a cultural left that was skeptical to say the least in the seventies, when Gallup showed all time lows in faithfulness and expectations of monogamy.
Had Romney gone that route, he would have been criticized on the left and the right for trimming on a moral point. But he would have evoked the tones around a lot of dinner tables last week, and he would have sounded like a leader whom the people at those dinner tables could get used to seeing on their screens for four years.
By Artur Davis, on Tue May 15, 2012 at 1:00 PM ET [Click here to follow the entire RP Debate]
Having gotten lost in this thread long ago, I will re-enter only to make a few observations:
-If one’s perspective is that Mitt Romney’s opposition to gay marriage and his parting of ways with a staffer whose public position was at odds with his own both amount to homophobia or bigotry, there is not much room for civil debate. I would beg to differ, and would only urge that a topic on which the country seems almost evenly split deserves a less absolutist frame.
-On the larger question of relevance, I side with the Miller/Steele way of looking at this episode: too long ago, too hard to separate from the context of juvenile foolishness, too hard to invoke against Romney without setting a standard that would scorch too many others. I also found intriguing one line of comments to the effect that the whole business of background mining to determine character would have wreaked havoc with a lot of good presidencies. It’s not that character has nothing to tell us about the potential misuses of power, but that it requires much more depth of knowledge and much more texture than today’s weakly sourced media snapshots can generally provide. And surely there is some statute of limitations.
-As to the other nagging charge, that Romney’s handling of this episode is revealing of some lack of empathy, I plead confusion. Should he have really waxed eloquent about a thing that he likely barely remembers, and that he reasonably contends has not much to do with his current values? Should Barack Obama have shown more anguish in describing the costs of teenaged drug use, or George Bush more passion in describing the wages of alcoholism? I’ll side with whoever said that the passions of these candidates on where they plan to take the country are worth more than their passions about their life lessons.
-Final point: I’ll confess disappointment that no one has bothered to address the timing of the Washington Post story, especially on a blog where more than a few of us have been at the mercy of press selectiveness in our past political lives. Timing is a huge power in journalism and the choice to run this story the day it ran is hard to qualify as anything other than a hit job. It was a pretty-clear cut instance of a news organization trying hard to link a 48 year old account to a current position on an issue. That is advocacy, not balls and strikes journalism; fine for a Huffington Post blogger, not fine for the second political paper of record in the country.
By Artur Davis, on Tue May 15, 2012 at 9:30 AM ET [Click here to follow the entire RP Debate]
I am in the camp that faults almost everything about this story: its timing–posting it the day after President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage was a thinly veiled effort to link Romney’s opposition to a pattern of bigotry; its placement as a stand-alone piece when the details merited at best inclusion in a longer profile; its strained attempt at making nearly 50 year old events relevant; and its effort to exaggerate the perennial cruelties of adolescence into the systematic brand of bullying that we have become sensitized to today.
That a major newspaper got so many things so wrong is hard to justify as anything other than an agenda. Somewhere along the way, a major section of the press has absorbed the idea that Romney is a hollow kind of character without empathy or conviction, who has sold his soul to a hard-right clique in his party,and whose election would reverse the dawn of a new multi-cultural, tolerant America.
Having convinced itself that Romney is so flawed, much of that press has fed virtually every inspection of his record and past through such an unforgiving filter. The effect is that too much of the coverage of Romney looks exactly like the chain-letter attacks the DNC spits out every day.
Its one thing for a blogger or a columnist to develop a character thesis and dig away at it. Its another thing for an established press organ with a neutral face to go that route.
By Artur Davis, on Mon May 14, 2012 at 9:30 AM ET The most eloquent, poignant argument I ever heard against same-sex marriage came from an African American woman in her late fifties who organized youth groups at a black mega-church in the South.
I can’t quote her verbatim but it went something like this: “in the black community, gay marriage is a source of worry because we struggle so hard, and against so many cultural forces, to make even conventional marriages work. We don’t buy into officially recognized alternative relationships because we can’t even win the battle to make the standard kind of marriage look appealing: not when our boys want the music video lifestyle—a different girl at every stanza in the song—our girls get degrees and can’t find men who can support them; and our teenagers think a baby is what happens when you become a woman or a man. Yet another alternative to men and women building families together? That’s a luxury we can’t afford.”
 There’s a heap of generalization there, and reasonable minds may or may not agree. In fact, I’ve heard more than a few blacks argue that legal marriages between black homosexuals beats the closets in the black community, which often have the unfair, reverse effect of making any heterosexual black man who stays single look suspect.
But the woman I mention was utterly free of malice and not at all reliant on Old Testament allusions to make her case. If you think she is in spite of that a beacon of intolerance, you’ve just indicted a thoughtful representation of about 60 percent of the African American community.
The media-filtered reaction to President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage has been predictable: an undercurrent of exaltation in the newsrooms that have long ceased to think of homosexuality as anything but another form of freedom; cherry-picked evangelical leaders who fit that same media’s expectations of what social conservatism looks and sounds like. To be sure, the networks and cable have brought forth their share of high profile African American ministers and Catholic bishops, but they aren’t the woman in that southern church running a youth group, trying to grapple with how social change shapes fatherless neighborhoods: the preachers and clerics are speaking in the accents of scripture and biblical text, which most Americans are in the custom of preaching not practicing.
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Artur Davis: The Gay Marriage Aftermath
By Artur Davis, on Thu May 10, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Quin Hilyer of the Center for Individual Freedom published an article about Artur Davis’ rise as a proponent for ballot integrity:
A new right-leaning star was born last weekend at the True the Vote summit in Houston, while the dynamo who heads True the Vote simultaneously achieved multiple goals related to ballot integrity. For a single 24-hour conference to achieve so much is remarkable, and deserves more attention than one meager column, alas, can give it. But let’s try.
First, what is True the Vote? Despite leftist propaganda to the effect that it is some sort of partisan (or even racial) attempt at vote suppression, True the Vote is a growing, bipartisan, multi-racial, national movement to ensure that elections are conducted with integrity and without polling-place antagonism. The idea is to place and train poll watchers, as per existing law, in every precinct in the country – so they will know exactly what they can and can’t do to stop and report voting irregularities without causing a stir that could in any way intimidate, much less suppress, legitimate voters….
But the surprising star of the show, according to many observers including this one, was former Rep. Artur Davis, the Alabama Democrat who gave one of the key nominating speeches for Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In recent months, Davis has written numerous times for the conservative National Review, and he strenuously opposed ObamaCare while in Congress, so it was already clear that on at least some issues he leans right of center. It was already known that he supported voter-ID laws: Last October 17 he wrote a column in the Montgomery Advertiser saying as much. Of fraudulently manufactured votes, he wrote then, “If you doubt it exists, I don’t; I’ve heard the peddlers of these ballots brag about it, I’ve been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident it has changed at least a few close local election results.”
But that was child’s play compared to the tour de force of a speech he made last weekend. Holding up a photo-ID, he ridiculed those who say it is too great a burden to require one – especially those who have said such a requirement is a violation of civil rights and human dignity.
“This is not a billy club,” he said, recalling violent civil rights battles of the past. “This is not a fire hose…. This is not Jim Crow…. My parents and my grandparents can tell you what a colored-only water fountain tasted like. They could tell you what a colored-only bathroom smelled like.” It certainly, he said, was nothing like his ID card: “this tiny little thing that doesn’t wound, that has no sharp edges.” And: “To call photo ID a degradation of human rights is not only something that is so fundamentally wrong, but is something my parents would not even recognize…. That [claim that ID requirements violate human rights] is the old tactic of telling us the very opposite of what it true.”
Also blasting the establishment media for waking up in tony enclaves and driving to offices in prime real estate while telling the rest of us that we are out of touch with America, Davis lumped those media folks together with the political ruling class that willingly looks away from (or tacitly condones) vote fraud. “You cannot let the insiders run this game,” he thundered.
Click here to read the full piece.
By Artur Davis, on Tue May 8, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET It is Lyndon Baines Johnson’s fate that as much as he was venerated during his career for his raw skills, he is remembered today largely as a colossal blunderer, by the right as a prototype of excess who spent taxpayers’ money profligately, and by the left as an adventurer who made a catastrophe out of a molehill called Vietnam. His own party, while framing the signature achievements in his domestic record–Medicare, the Voting Rights Act–as a secular temple that Republicans must be kept from dismantling, simultaneously avoids awarding Johnson much of the credit. His image is as grainy as the black and white television reels of his era, as harsh and remote as the perpetual grimace on his face in the footage from those reels.
Robert Caro’s latest entry in his opus on LBJ, “Passage to Power”, will do something to revive the 36th president’s reputation. It spans from Johnson’s inept, misconceived effort to win the presidency in 1960—a race which he never embraced and never seemed to think he should, much less would, win—to the stretch in the wilderness as John Kennedy’s vice president; to Johnson’s frenetic succession to power after November 22, 1963. Unexpectedly, the narrative stops in the spring of 1964, short of the demolition of Barry Goldwater, and well short of the 1965 legislative season that was Johnson’s epic moment. Caro’s readers will recognize that he has rarely felt bound by the precision of a conventional biographical framework and has stopped and started these volumes based on his own sense of rhythm and his perspective on which details best illuminate his much misunderstood subject.
 So, the last and next edition is the one that will take on the well worn tale of Johnson going up and down Mt. Olympus between the 64 election and the fall from grace in 1968. This narrative dwells on the less familiar struggles of a politician who was unsuited to the changes that television and the atrophy of the establishment were effecting during the 1960 election; and to the almost as forgotten description of a president seeking to convert an unprecedented public moment, the assassination of a leader with an unfulfilled and active agenda, into a legislative program on Capitol Hill, in a political climate that was decidedly more right-leaning and resistant to change than is currently appreciated.
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Artur Davis: The No Longer Practiced Politics of LBJ
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In contrast, Hispanic interest groups are in the midst of a bad run. They are winless at the congressional level in the preceding decade—losing badly in their campaign to open up citizenship opportunities for much of the illegal immigrant population, and failing in a more incremental bid to legalize young undocumented adults who join the military or complete college. During Barack Obama’s term, they have actually lost ground. Alabama and Arizona have passed sharply restrictive laws aimed at making their states all but unlivable for illegal immigrants. The Democratic Party that generally wins Latino votes has been an ambivalent ally, with two major elements of their base, labor unions and African Americans, skeptical of any broad liberalization of immigration laws. 
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