ARTUR DAVIS ROCKS

"America is a land of second chances, and I gather you have room for the estimated 6 million of us who know we got it wrong in 2008 and who want to fix it," said Artur Davis, who in Denver in 2008 seconded the nomination of Barack Hussein Obama for president, and served as co-chairman of his campaign.

Mr. Davis, 44, was reared by his mother in a low income neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama.  A smart kid who studied hard, he earned a scholarship to Harvard.  That he was graduated magna cum laude in 1990 indicates affirmative action had little to do with his success. 

He remained at Harvard to get a law degree, then returned to Alabama, first to clerk for a judge, then to become a federal prosecutor with a near perfect record of putting away drug dealers.

"If you want an American bootstrap story, his is it," political scientist Natalie Davis told the New Democrats Online website.

Mr. Davis was elected to Congress in 2002.  He ran for governor in 2010, but lost in the Democrat primary.

Last night (8/28), Artur Davis spoke again at a national political convention.  But this time he was in Tampa with the Republicans, where he explained why he is supporting Mitt Romney for president.

Mr. Obama’s reckless spending, Obamacare, and his failure to do much about high unemployment have disappointed millions who voted for him in 2008, Mr. Davis said.  So have his broken promises about eschewing negative politics.

"Maybe we should have known that night in Denver that things that begin with plywood Greek columns and artificial smoke typically don’t end well," he said.  "We led with our hearts and our dreams that we could be more inclusive than America had ever been."

Mr. Davis said not a word about race.  But more than the role he played in the president’s last campaign, it is his race that makes Artur Davis the most significant of disillusioned Obama supporters.

In a 2004 poll, 41 percent of blacks described themselves as conservative.  Higher percentages of African-Americans hold conservative views on social issues, crime, illegal immigration and school choice.  But customarily, only 8-12 percent vote for the conservative candidate in the general election.  

In 2008, more than 19 out of every 20 blacks voted for Barack Hussein Obama.  If just half the blacks who say they’re conservative voted that way, Democrats might never again win the presidency, or a majority in Congress.

Black conservatives vote essentially the same as black liberals because "black conservatives with high levels of group consciousness support the party deemed best for the racial group," said Tasha Philpott, a political science professor at the University of Texas, in a paper this year.

Blacks originally became Democrats because of the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt.  That racial consciousness is the chief reason they adhere now to the party of slavery and segregation is ironic.

Democrats and their allies in the news media do all they can to promote racial consciousness.  Every criticism Republicans make of liberal policies is deemed "racist."  Blacks who stray from the Democrat plantation are subjected to vicious personal attacks.

Or liberal journalists pretend they don’t exist.  MSNBC cut away from Mr. Davis’ speech, and from the fiery remarks of Mia Love, a beautiful young woman who is striving to become the first black Republican woman in Congress.

Artur Davis didn’t mention race, but his critics sure did.  His is "an opportunistic Judas conversion," emblematic of "highly visible Blacks who are willing to spit on Martin Luther King’s dream," said Major Owens, who represented a district in Brooklyn from 1983 to 2007.

Martin Luther King said he had a dream "that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  It isn’t Mr. Davis who’s spitting on it.

Mr. Davis describes his views as "center-right."  A few months ago he re-registered as a Republican because, after its lurch leftward under President Obama, there is no longer room in the Democrat party for people who think the way he does.

Pay attention to what’s said at the Democrat convention in Charlotte next week, Mr. Davis counseled moderate Democrats:

When they say we have a duty to grow government even when we can’t afford it, does it sound like compassion to you — or recklessness?

When you hear the party that glorified Occupy Wall Street blast success; when you hear them minimize the genius of the men and women who make jobs out of nothing, is that what you teach your children about work?

When they tell you America is this unequal place where the powerful trample on the powerless, does that sound like the country your children or your spouse risked their lives for in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Do you even recognize the America they are talking about?

Is Artur Davis an anomaly…or the start of a trend?  

Younger blacks who, like Artur Davis, have succeeded primarily on their own merits, and who haven’t encountered much in the way of racial discrimination, don’t have the race consciousness of older black "leaders" such as Major Owens. 

In his screed attacking Mr. Davis, Major Owens also savaged  Harold Ford Jr., another young black moderate with a distinguished resume.  He also was graduated from an Ivy  League college (Penn).  He got his law degree from the University of Michigan in 1996, and was elected to Congress from a district in Memphis his father had represented the same year. 

After losing a race for the Senate in Tennessee in 2006, Mr. Ford moved to New York and became an investment banker.

Another young black moderate in the mold of Artur Davis and Harold Ford Jr. is Cory Booker, 43, a former Rhodes Scholar who got his undergraduate degree from Stanford, his law degree from Yale.  He’s been mayor of Newark, N.J. since 2006. 

As mayor, he cleaned up corruption of his black predecessors; sharply reduced Newark’s crime rate, and greatly improved the city’s finances – largely from attracting charitable donations from wealthy people.

A firm believer in the capitalist system that made his donors wealthy, Mayor Booker caused a flap in May when he described the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney for his work at Bain Capital as "nauseating."

I have to just say, from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America, especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses.

The last point I’ll make is this kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides. It’s nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.

Pressure from the White House and other prominent Democrats forced Mr. Booker to walk back his comments the next day, in a video statement he posted on YouTube.  Of that video, Jonathan Tobin of Commentary magazine said:  "It was as if it were a video from a hostage being held for ransom."

One has to wonder how much room there is for Cory Booker in Barack Hussein Obama’s Democrat party.  Other, younger blacks who’ve been succeeding on their own  are starting to notice that blacks haven’t done very well where Democrats rule.  They’ve done especially poorly during the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. 

We won’t know before November whether Artur Davis is an anomaly, or a harbinger of change.  But expect to see him often this fall at Mitt Romney’s side, talking about jobs, debt, patriotism and school choice.  It would be ironic if the economic policies of the first (half) black president caused a significant shift of blacks away from the Democrat party.

Blacks have been so loyal to the Democrats for so long that few are likely to budge from their traditional loyalty.  Those who are unhappy with his economic policies, Obamacare and gay marriage are more likely to stay home than to vote Republican. 

This is why liberal journalists plainly are worried.  That’s why they’re now so frantically playing the race card.

Ps:  Here’s Artur Davis’s speech in full last night for you to enjoy:

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.