Davis campaign off to a shaky start

St. Petersburg Times ^ | 9/10/2006 | TIM NICKENS

[Happy Valley Dude]

Jim Davis' general election campaign for governor turned sour the moment he started celebrating winning the Democratic nomination.

"How sweet it is!" he declared Tuesday night, digging at the sugar industry's investment of several million dollars on behalf of Rod Smith.

Nothing wrong with poking a deep-pocket special interest. But Davis never mentioned Smith in his victory speech, never reached out to Smith's supporters, much less to Republicans. Meanwhile, Republican Charlie Crist was celebrating his more decisive primary victory by reaching out to Tom Gallagher's supporters, Democrats and anybody else within earshot.

For Davis, the day after was even worse.

He was joined by reporters as he dialed up U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings of Miramar, one of the state's three African-American members of Congress (Another miscalculation. Did Davis forget that Hastings is blunt and liable to say anything?). It turned out Crist already had called Hastings the night before. And Hastings brought up the very issue Smith and Big Sugar hammered home. As a state legislator, Davis voted against compensating Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, two black men who had been pardoned after serving 12 years in prison for a murder they didn't commit.

"Jim," Hastings said, "you have to be a different white man."

So we begin the general election campaign for governor with remarkable role reversals. Here's Crist, the Republican state attorney general, quickly uniting his own party and courting African-American Democrats. He can point to a record that includes voting for a later Pitts and Lee compensation bill as a state senator, supporting a law that gave him new tools to go after civil rights violations as attorney general, reinvestigating the 1951 unsolved murders of black civil rights activists, and fining a Perry motel owner for discriminating against African-Americans.

And here's Davis, with a splintered Democratic Party, a terrible vote on Pitts and Lee he has failed to explain, and serious skepticism about his candidacy from African-American voters he needs to have any chance of winning.

Think this is just a dirty race-baiting campaign tactic, an old argument about 43-year-old murders and a 16-year-old state House committee vote? In Broward County last week, a newspaper analysis of 75 black precincts showed Davis won only two. Pitts and Lee are powerful symbols of Florida's ugly past and of the state's inexplicable delay in fully acknowledging and paying for such injustices.

Davis is no racist. He is a caring, decent man who has served his Tampa-based legislative and congressional districts well. He has supported countless social services, education programs and other issues important to African-Americans - including the Legislature's historic bill to compensate survivors of the 1923 Rosewood massacre.

And he is too cautious by half. Pitts and Lee came up in Davis' first congressional campaign a decade ago. He knew it would come up again, and he should have dealt with it before Smith or Big Sugar even raised it.

Peter Wallace, the former state House speaker from St. Petersburg, served on the same House committee with Davis in 1990. He also voted against compensating Pitts and Lee. Now, Wallace told me Friday, "I regret it, because I believe we looked at the issue too narrowly in a judicial setting."

"We just overlawyered it," he said. "We spent too much time analyzing and not going with the gut."

Davis needs to make the same point. He needs to quit reviewing the record and start making decisions. He needs to speak from his heart, not from legal briefs.

Davis also has to name a running mate this week, and the Pitts and Lee controversy is backing him into a corner. If he names an African-American, some voters will see it as pandering to make up for a bad vote. If he doesn't, critics will make the incorrect assumption he doesn't care about minorities.

For Davis, the worst approach would be to buy into that sort of thinking as he heads into a make or break week for his campaign. He has to quit stalling and deal squarely with his Pitts and Lee vote. And he has to name a qualified running mate who, regardless of race, can energize South Florida in general and black voters in particular.

Otherwise, the only way Davis is going to see the inside of the Governor's Mansion is if Charlie Crist invites him in.

[Happy Valley Dude]

I was a pollwatcher for the Republican Party of Florida on primary day in a big African-American precinct. Davis got clobbered there.