U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Birmingham, spent part of a spring afternoon in Mobile doing the quiet, unglamorous work of statewide ambition: shaking hands over lunch with three dozen or so of the city’s politically active residents.
The gathering, a Dutch-treat luncheon at The Bakery, was arranged by Mobile attorney and political figure Palmer Hamilton, who described the purpose in plain terms.
“The purpose was to let him meet some Mobilians,” Hamilton said. “He has been here, of course, but he hasn’t gotten to spend a lot of time here. And Mobile is going to need his help in the future.”
A congressman with unusual leverage
That last point was the practical case for the luncheon. Davis, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former federal prosecutor representing Alabama’s 7th District, held a pair of positions that gave him more influence than his seniority alone would suggest. He served as an assistant majority whip in the House, and he was the only member of the Alabama delegation seated on the House Ways and Means Committee — the panel that writes tax law and, by extension, holds sway over the incentives that states use to lure industry.
For a metropolitan area then in the middle of an industrial recruiting run — with ThyssenKrupp’s steel complex north of Mobile, Austal’s shipyard on the river and a string of other prospects in play — a friendly voice on Ways and Means was not an abstraction. Hamilton noted that Davis was well positioned to advocate for the state with industrial recruits in particular.
Who came
The guest list was a fair cross-section of Mobile’s business and civic leadership. Among those present were Bestor Ward of Ward Properties, then chairman of the board of the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce; University of South Alabama President Gordon Moulton; Keith King of Volkert Engineering; Bruce Croushore; Marietta Urquhart of Heggeman Realty; CPA Mike Thompson; University of South Alabama lobbyist Happy Fulford; Buffy and Bob Donlon of Wintzell’s; Alabama Gulf Coast Chamber of Commerce president Mark Berson and two of his sons; attorney E.B. Peebles; and Ginny Russell and Bill Sisson of the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce.
One businessperson who attended called Davis “certainly an impressive speaker with an impressive presence.”
By happenstance, Davis’s Republican colleague from Mobile, U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner, was lunching at The Bakery the same day. Bonner stopped by briefly to tell the group about what he described as the strong working relationship within the Alabama delegation — a bipartisan grace note that said something about how the state’s congressmen preferred to be seen at home.
The subtext: what comes next
Nobody at the table needed the speculation spelled out. Davis had been mentioned for higher office almost from the moment he arrived in Congress in 2003, first for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Jeff Sessions, and more recently for the governorship in 2010, when Republican Gov. Bob Riley would be term-limited out. In the unlikely event that U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby retired, Davis was expected to weigh that race as well. And if Democrats held the House, his influence within it stood to keep growing.
Any statewide campaign in Alabama runs through Mobile and Baldwin counties, which together anchor the southern end of the state and deliver a large share of the Democratic primary vote as well as a formidable Republican general-election bloc. Introductions of the kind Hamilton arranged were the necessary groundwork.
Davis did run for governor in 2010. He lost the Democratic primary decisively to Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks, a defeat that ended his career in Alabama Democratic politics and eventually led him to switch parties. But in the spring of 2007, in a private room in Mobile, that outcome was unimaginable. What the room saw was a young congressman with a seat on the most powerful committee in the House, meeting the people who would have to be with him if he ever asked the state for something bigger.