By Artur Davis, on Mon Sep 10, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Last week, Bill Clinton was the consummate trial lawyer that he would have become had his Arkansas comebacks not worked out: saddled with bad facts, he talked three times as long and tugged on twice as many heartstrings as he and his text had planned.
To use a riff that Clinton regularly invoked, was he right? Infrequently, and the wrongs included some whoppers: like the Democratic meme that a grinch named Mitch McConnell stole Obama’s prospects by pledging to block his reelection. The only problem: when McConnell said it, he had a meager 40 votes in the Senate, and managed to stop a grand total of 0 Obama initiatives in the first half of this term (even after gaining a 41st vote to preserve the right of filibuster). Then there is the inconvenient truth that the allegedly obstructive McConnell cut a deal with Democrats that avoided a massive scheduled tax hike at the end of 2010 and by so doing, almost certainly saved Obama from a second recession in three years.
 And the jobs bill that the grinch supposedly blocked in 2011: still waiting for an Obama loyalist, Harry Reid, to bring it to the floor in a Democratic Senate. Which of course calls to mind the multiple Obama budgets, the prescriptive documents that Clinton once called “blueprints for the future”, that failed to command a single Democratic vote in either house. An oddity perhaps of the legislative process, but one more thing that undercuts the theme that it is a unique kind of right-wing intransigence that has undone Obama.
What about the notion that hard-hearted Republicans have it in mind to devastate Medicaid and to leave the old and poor in a tear-inducing state? Powerful, beautiful words–it just happens that it was the Obama Administration that threatened to shut down state Medicaid programs if governors refused to accept the Affordable Care Act’s new Medicaid regulations, until seven Supreme Court justices stopped them. Or the glossing over of the Affordable Care Act’s 700 billion dollar reduction in Medicare on the grounds that it was “merely” a reduction in provider fees: a shrewdly constructed distinction until one recalls that the essence of Medicare is reimbursing providers rather than making direct outlays to patients.
It was telling, too, that Clinton in full flight, and with 50 minutes to do it, never found his way to a rendition of Obama’s record that is as succinct and as definitive as the former president’s take on his own tenure: 22 million jobs, expanded wealth and reduced poverty, and fiscal policies that augmented enough purchasing power to amount to a check to American. The Obama case, even in its most lovingly embroidered light, is too textured with mitigation—replacing precipitous losses with still meager private sector job growth that is way short of the natural expansion in the labor pool; a healthcare overhaul that does not contain private costs; a Wall Street reform that does not rein in wild speculative losses at JP Morgan; heightened poverty and child hunger on a liberal president’s watch, a relatively successful legislative record that few Americans feel affected by. That the master orator could not condense it into a success story with no “buts”, and the fact that the words “Barack Obama has succeeded” were missing from Clinton’s text and the ad-libs, speaks volumes to Obama’s dilemma.
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Artur Davis: Clinton for the Defense
By RP Staff, on Fri Aug 24, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET April Ryan, of the Roland Martin Podcast, talks with contributing RP Artur Davis, former Democrat and Obama supporter who is now a Republican and is backing Mitt Romney supporter in the 2012 presidential election.
Davis details his upcoming address at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL as well as his disappointment with the last four years. Plus, Davis discusses if Republicans will address important issues that impact the African-American community.
Click here to listen in.
By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 23, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET There has always been a measured slickness in how Barack Obama’s political operation has handled race, the third rail in politics. They have taken the guards off the rail and made an old obstacle an instrument of fashion. And they have done so with an instinct for the genuine and legitimate guilt surrounding race in American life. As political maneuver, it is a thing of grace in some ways.
At least until the thing turns shameless and expedient. Bill Clinton got the first dose of the treatment, when he protested that Obama’s credentials as an anti-war stalwart were “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” That comment was then shape-shifted from a hard political jab at Obama’s rhetorical dodges on the Iraq War to an insinuation that the notion that Obama could win the presidency was wishful fantasy. No dispassionate observer who saw the video and heard Clinton in full cry would have arrived at the seamier interpretation, but with the nudging of Axelrod and Co., and with a little help from South Carolina’s congressman Jim Clyburn, the idea that Clinton meant much worse took hold.
 The punch that Clinton absorbed was uncocked repeatedly. Sometimes on defense — when the Jeremiah Wright tapes surfaced, for example, the reasonable question of what drew Obama to a church with a history of incendiary rhetoric was cleverly converted to a teaching moment about an older generation’s fixation with race. When questions about the link between Obama and his old neighbor and fundraiser William Ayers started to burn, the line of inquiry was brushed off as an indirect method of raising fears about black radicalism, and it soon faded.
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Artur Davis: Obama’s Hidden-Hand Politics
By RP Staff, on Mon Aug 20, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
Our prolific contributing RP, former Congressman Artur Davis, who recently switched from a Democrat to a Republican, was announced last week as a featured speaker at the upcoming Republican National Convention. Here is David Fahrentold’s profile from The Washington Post:
 This is Artur Davis’s job now, the work that he hopes will resurrect his political career. Wear a suit. Speak to strangers. Explain that what had been some of the most important causes of his life — a political party and a president — turned out to be mistakes.
“How many of us believed, four years ago, that Barack Obama was not just a politician?” Davis, a former four-term congressman, asked Mitt Romney supporters in Arlington County’s Ballston neighborhood on Wednesday. The Romney people said nothing, but Davis kept on: This was his story, not theirs.
“We may not have the power to stop it,” Davis said of President Obama’s campaign. “But the American people have the power to punish it.”
Four years ago, Davis was onstage at the Democratic convention: a fast-rising congressman from Alabama, so close to Obama that he provided the official “second” for Obama’s nomination.
On Thursday, the Republican Party said he would be a “headliner” at its convention in Tampa, where he will be one of Obama’s most prominent African American critics.
By Artur Davis, on Fri Aug 17, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET For the most part, Bill Clinton’s reconstruction of the Democratic Party is a masterpiece that did not survive the consummate political artist’s time in power: balanced budgets seem like a relic of a bygone era; the pro-growth, business friendly wing of the Democratic Party has given way to Elizabeth Warren style populism; and modulated stances on social issues have been replaced with legal fights against Catholic hospitals, rhetorical battle cries about a “War on Women”, and a place in the party’s platform for a fifty state right of same sex marriage.
The exception, the one preserved centrist jewel from that era, had been (until last week) the 1996 reform of welfare. As a policy instrument, the conversion of welfare from an entitlement to an earned benefit conditioned on work, job training, or secondary level education like a GDE program rested on decades of data about the perils of dependency in poor communities. As a political instrument, coupling public assistance with a work requirement achieved a stunning result: a benefit program that had been deeply controversial, and racially polarizing, was re-crafted as a bipartisan amalgam of left-leaning altruism and right-leaning notions of personal responsibility.
As a result, one of the most contentious ideological disputes between seventies and eighties era conservatives and liberals all but disappeared as a flashpoint. It has been Social Security and Medicare–not welfare–that movement conservatives have sought to redesign in the past eight years, and the most provocative expenditure of public dollars in the last four years has been the transfer of nearly a trillion dollars to the banking and automobile industries rather than any form of public assistance.
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Artur Davis: Setting Welfare Back on Fire
By Artur Davis, on Wed Aug 15, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET It’s tempting to wonder how candidate Barack Obama would have performed in 2008 if he had campaigned on President Barack Obama’s agenda in the first seven months of 2012. Imagine if the Illinois Senator had gone on record favoring a rewrite of federal regulations to mandate Catholic institutions to cover contraceptives in their insurance plans; if he had endorsed same-sex marriage; if he had pledged to dismantle the work requirement at the centerpiece of welfare reform; and if he claimed the executive authority to alter federal immigration laws on his own without waiting for congressional approval.
The likely result is that the base of his party would have been thrilled at such a thoroughgoing progressive vision, but that Obama would have hardened his image as a Kerry/Dukakis like cultural liberal with a tin ear for Middle America. The McCain campaign certainly would have had ammunition fresher than the obscure William Ayers to cast Obama as an ideological risk and, perhaps, a path to divert conservative independents and blue collar Hillary Clinton voters from the crevasses in the economy.
In the real universe, and not this parallel one of progressive fantasies, Obama campaigned as someone quite different from the liberal warrior Republicans would have relished running against. To the extent Obama ventured into cultural politics at all, it was with the measured nuance of a Clintonian moderate: tolerant of civil unions, but opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds; respectful of the public divide on reproductive rights, and virtual silence on an immigration proposal that had dominated congressional debate just two summers earlier. Obama even described the welfare reform that he had opposed as a rookie legislator as an unmitigated success and its work requirement as a “centerpiece of any social policy.”
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Artur Davis: Obama’s Left Turn
By Artur Davis, on Mon Aug 13, 2012 at 11:30 AM ET I will offer the obligatory caveat: I know Paul Ryan from serving with him on two congressional committees for all eight years I served in the House. It is not fair to call him a friend, at least not in the way human beings who aren’t politicians use that term, but I liked him a great deal. I liked the little things– when he engaged you in conversation, you had his attention and his eyes didn’t drift in search of a more powerful member, or a potential donor– and I admired the more consequential things, like his genuine smarts and the fact that when he spoke on the floor or in hearings, you heard the product of an active mind that didn’t need ghostwriting or lobbyist drafted talking points. Frankly, I don’t know the politics of the pick. The Obama campaign is way too thrilled at this announcement for me to attribute it just to gamesmanship or wishfulness: they know that the Ryan budget plan has not polled well, that its realignment of Medicare unsettles seniors, and that to some independents (and Newt Gingrich) it looks more like ideological engineering than a response to our current bout of economic stagnation. A campaign that just wrapped a woman’s death around Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, facts be damned, will not shrink from painting Ryan as a cold-blooded, Ayn Rand inspired radical who puts theory over people.
My hope, as someone who wants this ticket to win, is that Paul Ryan, an imminently decent and pleasant man, will look to Americans nothing like the caricature that Democrats are about to paint. The campaigner who has won easily in a district Barack Obama carried has the raw ability to make a case that his budget really is a blueprint for a shared prosperity. I also think he can and will point out that an entitlement structure built for a population that rarely lived past seventy has to be refitted for a future where octogenarians are the fastest rising age demographic; that universal, one size fits all Medicare coverage has always been more a political bribe to sustain support than some solemn moral commitment; that government overpromising its capacities is itself immoral; and that the first casualties of an entitlement train-wreck would be the poor and the vulnerable, and that they above all need the current compact to be amended so its best parts can survive.
My other hopes are that Paul Ryan’s reformer instincts aren’t just built around budgets. Conservatism needs to adopt education reform as a cause, not as a wedge against the selfishness of teachers unions, but as the most effective instrument to reduce inequality. Conservatism needs not just to repeal Obamacare but to replace it with a market based correction to the inadequacies of the status quo. The political right has to reclaim legal immigration as a point of pride and to distance itself from overheated claims about “us” losing “our” culture: that means much less talk about “self-deportation” crusades against illegals, much more confidence in assimilation, much more focus on an immigration regime that privileges individual responsibility and families.
The guy I admired from across the aisle and sometimes chatted with gets all of the above. I also think that Ryan knows that his party’s (and now my party’s) future rests on conservatism growing and adapting to a changed economic world in a way that liberalism never has.
So, without minimizing the risk in claiming a space that Democrats have effectively attacked for years, I felt inspired seeing Paul Ryan rise from obscurity to the epicenter of politics in the last 24 hours. If this ends well, a campaign that has been accused of running a prevent defense without being ahead may have just made a downpayment on its party’s future.
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Aug 7, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Ted Cruz’s Senate win in Texas was no upset by the time he pulled it off, and for all of the necessary public posturing from David Dewhurst’s camp, it would taken scandal or a natural disaster to arrest Cruz’s momentum. Every atmospheric detail favored Cruz, from his assiduous courting of the state’s Tea Party activists while Dewhurst confused checks from the Texas GOP establishment with a voter base; to the edge primaries usually confer on insurgent candidacies; to the fact that Cruz demonstrated a quick learning curve as a first-timer, while Dewhurst had not run a competitive race in about a decade.
There will be a substantial case made today, as Ed Kilgore already has in The New Republic, that Cruz’s win is primarily emblematic of the ongoing internal coup in Republican ranks by far-right, anti-accommodation jihadists. It’s certainly right that Dewhurst was tabbed as an Austin insider who was too cozy with the state’s ruling class, but it’s hard to attribute that line of attack to a particular ideological mantra—especially in this case, when by Kilgore’s own account, Dewhurst had no real ideological apostasies for Cruz to tout. While much of the mainstream commentary tries to have it both ways, assuming Cruz’s win proves the hard-right tilt of GOP primaries and simultaneously conceding Dewhurst’s conservative bona fides, it’s at most more likely, and at least worth considering that Cruz’s outsider status mattered considerably more than litmus tests.
 Recognizing that the Texas race was one between two mainline conservatives and not a reprise of, say Christine O’Donnell and a avowed moderate like Mike Castle, upends a certain narrative about tea partiers in Texas and elsewhere. It’s a liberal article of faith that the Tea Party’s rise is fueled by a militancy that would level government to the ground; in reality, it’s much more a symptom of an altogether plausible conclusion—that government at every level has veered off course, lost touch with popular sentiment, fallen into the grip of monied interests, and struggled to deliver even core public services. In other words, a gripe that liberals themselves sound often enough, and hardly one outside the realm of regular political discourse.
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Artur Davis: What Liberals Are Missing About Ted Cruz
By Artur Davis, on Wed Aug 1, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Showtime’s new mini-series “Political Animals” insists that it is not really a knock-off on the saga that is Bill and Hillary Clinton: the resemblance between Sigourney Weaver’s Elaine Barrish and Hillary is merely the surface match between two former First Ladies who endured a presidential sex scandal involving a junior staffer, subsequently launched their own political careers, and lost the Democratic presidential nomination to a smooth, if distant, senator who brings Elaine/Hillary into the Secretary of State’s position. Elaine’s ex, former president Donald “Bud” Hammond, (Ciaran Hinds) just happens to sound, charm, and manipulate like William Jefferson Clinton.
The parallels do break: Elaine Barrish, we learn by episode two, executed the forgiving spouse role only up to a point, divorcing her husband in the aftermath of her defeat in the primaries. And unlike Hillary, Elaine’s loyalties to her new boss are skin deep at best: she is already plotting to take him on in the next campaign. But the severance in the time line does not begin, or even attempt, to mask the obvious: the show is a guilty pleasure window into what the Clintons’ personal and public chaos might look like from the inside, and if the characterizations so far can seem more like an impersonation of the Clintons than an real exploration, it is richly entertaining in the same way the originals are. “Political Animals”, like the real thing it is based on, is a brew of tawdriness, deceit, inspiration, and fortitude, that works in spite of all the reasons it shouldn’t.
 Among the reasons it shouldn’t work: the storylines to date–a mini hostage crisis in the Middle East, the Hammonds’ juggling of one son’s engagement party with the other son’s emotional spiral–are pedestrian stuff. The personal sketches reach for their share of clichéd foibles: the young reporter who exposed Bud Hammond’s escapades and has trained her sights on Elaine Barrish has her own penchant for personal turbulence and seems to have boundary issues of her own; the two Hammond children are sons (thankfully, Chelsea remains outside creative license, at least for now) and in predictable modern cinematic fashion, one is tormented, artistically gifted, and gay; the other ferociously protective and resentful of his father’s capriciousness, but if the teasers at the end of the last episode are right, possibly possessed of some of his father’s weaknesses. If cultural stereotypes are your peeve, some of the clichés touch on troubling ground: the Asian woman who is the fiancee of Douglas Hammond is a bulimic perfectionist whose first generation parents are inordinately status conscious; the foreign diplomats are all lecherous or spineless, and there is a weird dearth of African American or Latino characters. This is not the “Good Wife”, whose regular and recurring cast seamlessly integrates every strand of the social rainbow without really trying, and gives each the gift of individuality.
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Artur Davis: “Political Animals” is Telling Us Something
By Artur Davis, on Mon Jul 30, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET It took literally minutes for politics to get twisted into the massacre in Aurora, Colorado. ABC News’ Brian Ross (the same journalist who slandered former House Speaker Dennis Hastert with an unattributed and false report that he was a target of a criminal probe) took to the air to link the shooter to the Tea Party. The claim was quickly unmasked as a breathtaking stupidity, based on connecting a shared, reasonably common name that is worn by a couple dozen people in the Denver phonebook.
Then, when the link between James Holmes and the ideological right was severed, it took minutes more to unearth the politics of gun control. The Internet and cable news are already awash with the notion that Holmes’ atrocity is an indictment of any number of related sins, from permissive gun laws in general, to the ease of obtaining tear gas and ammunition on the web, to the fecklessness of candidates and congressmen in the face of the NRA’s might, to the inevitable wages of a society that endorses gun possession as a constitutional liberty at all.
 Americans typically dig for social and institutional causes for the most unfathomable examples of evil. It’s not only liberal talk show hosts who were quick to tie the coarsening of the political culture to the slaughter at a congressional event in Arizona in 2011. Our instinct of forces larger than us driving our destiny, a religious and psychological strand in our thinking, ill prepares us for the power a loner caught in his own warped view can wield.
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Artur Davis: An Evil Without Solution
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And the jobs bill that the grinch supposedly blocked in 2011: still waiting for an Obama loyalist, Harry Reid, to bring it to the floor in a Democratic Senate. Which of course calls to mind the multiple Obama budgets, the prescriptive documents that Clinton once called “blueprints for the future”, that failed to command a single Democratic vote in either house. An oddity perhaps of the legislative process, but one more thing that undercuts the theme that it is a unique kind of right-wing intransigence that has undone Obama.
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