Black Caucus Conservatives Attempt to Clone Themselves

“There’s no question that it was well planned and, to be honest with you, well executed.”

Davis was a beneficiary of the mid-Nineties corporate decision to change the political complexion of Democratic Black America. The scheme became operational in 2002, unseating Hilliard and Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney, and installing David Scott in a new district just south of Atlanta. Although the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was eager to take credit for Hilliard’s and McKinney’s defeats, the offensive was actually hatched in corporate think tanks and boardrooms, years before. AIPAC crowed loudly, for intimidation effect, but corporate operatives deployed the big bucks and media.

Davis won 56 percent to 44 percent in the 60 percent Black district, garnering a minority of the Black vote and nearly all the whites. (He did, however, do somewhat better among Blacks than Denise Majette, who beat McKinney in Georgia with only about 16 percent of the African American vote.) Most Congressional Black Caucus members backed Hilliard. However, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (D-Triple-C) provided only tepid and belated support to incumbent Hilliard in 2002.

David Scott also enjoyed overwhelming corporate backing to win his first campaign for a suburban Atlanta seat, outspending his opponent by more than 3 to 1 ($1,286,263 to $409,831). Corporations spent lots of money to create the “Worst Black Congressperson.”

In 2004, another money monsoon was arranged for Artur Davis’s benefit to ensure that Alabama’s Black Belt seat remained safe for corporate America. It was overkill. Davis spent $1,061,356 – 75 percent of it from business interests. His Democratic primary opponent, Albert Turner Jr., a Perry County Commissioner and son of a noted civil rights leader, raised only $26,340 – a 40 to 1 disadvantage. Turner’s pitiful war chest was about equal to the yearly household income of one median family in the district, the poorest in the CBC.

The corporate largess that allowed Davis to spend over a million dollars to crush an impoverished opponent – well over twice the average CBC member’s campaign contributions per election cycle – marked him as a go-to Black guy in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which arranged for his key posting as African American candidate recruiter. Davis can now direct both corporate and Democratic Party funds to his corporate clones in the Southeast, home to the majority of the U.S. Black population. He is the perfectly positioned Trojan Horse in African American electoral politics. In tandem with the DLC’s Albert Wynn (MD), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC, Davis has the power to eventually render the CBC unrecognizable – and institutionally useless for anything other than legislation acceptable to corporate boardrooms.

BP PAC

Clearly, the task is the create a Black Progressive PAC. In every previous generation, African Americans have discussed – and some have made efforts to create – mechanisms to independently fund Black political movements and electoral candidacies. At the turn of the 20th Century, when Booker T. Washington’s corporate-funded “Tuskegee Machine” wielded vast influence over Black political affairs, more radical Black voices struggled to make themselves heard, with scant resources. Marcus Garvey organized an African American grassroots fund-raising operation that has not been equaled, since. However, Garvey eschewed electoral politics in favor of reclaiming Africa.

Since the liberating Sixties, the Black political fund-raising conversation has revolved around finding resources to put more Black faces in high places – what we at BC call “head count politics.” This lack of in-depth attention to Black candidates’ detailed political agendas usually worked out well enough, in general. Despite individual cases of corruption, it was exceedingly rare that an African American elected from a Black majority jurisdiction would openly defy the historical Black Political Consensus on issues of peace, social and racial equality, public power vs. corporate domination, elemental fairness in the marketplace and public sphere, and the responsibility of government to reverse historical wrongs and inequities.

All that has changed, most dramatically since 2002. The corporate cash intervention in Black electoral politics, closely coordinated with corporate media attacks on “civil rights-type” politicians, has subverted and deformed much of the Black political landscape. Although there is no evidence that the masses of Blacks have been persuaded to turn against themselves, a significant portion of the Black political class has been purchased or cowed.

The house needs cleaning, before we can re-focus on expansion of Black political representation.

The urgently needed Black Progressive PAC (BP PAC) must 1) be supported mainly by small donations from a broad base of predominantly Black donors, 2) fund and endorse candidates and incumbents based on their adherence to progressive positions on “bright line” issues, and 3) conduct extensive voter education and candidate development work, in the knowledge that overwhelming majorities of Blacks support progressive stances on “bright line” issues and, if informed, will vote accordingly. (In the last instance, BP PAC will clash directly with Rep. Artur Davis – the Black corporate clone-candidate developer at the D-Triple-C – and with Rep. Albert Wynn, if he remains head of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC.)

Scope of the mission

To put the political and financial task in perspective, the entire Congressional Black Caucus – excluding the non-voting delegates from Washington, DC and the U.S. Virgin Islands and Illinois Senator Barack Obama – campaigns on less than $20 million every two-year election cycle. (Forty-one members x an average $466,188 in campaign contributions = $19,113,708.) BP PAC will not be required to intervene in most current CBC districts. About two-thirds of Caucus members are consistently progressive and need not be challenged, and most progressive members occupy relatively safe seats (for the time being).

The mere existence of an adequately funded BP PAC, capable of mounting a serious challenge to incumbents who step over “bright lines,” will act as a deterrent to defections to the Right. A number of the 15 Black congresspersons that crossed one or more “bright lines” last month (see the chart, below), would not have done so if BP PAC existed.