Davis is not your ordinary Democrat
Opposes free trade as costing U. S. jobs
In the heated contest for the Democratic nomination to replace Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, Jack Davis stands out in ways that are not conventionally Democratic.
He’s the only one suggesting a novel solution for both urban poverty and a shortage of farm labor that’s stemmed from a crackdown on illegal immigration.
“We have a huge unemployment problem with black youth in our cities,” Davis told the Tonawanda News recently. “Put them on buses, take them out there [to the farms] and pay them a decent wage; they will work.”
On top of that, Davis — the millionaire industrialist who went to the Supreme Court to win the unimpeded right to spend up to $3 million of his own money on his campaign— is the only Democrat in the race who favors extending President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy.
He’s the only Democrat who says he’s not sure whether Barack Obama or John McCain has a better idea on how to fix the health care system.
And he’s the only one who doubts that human beings caused global warming, and who thinks we shouldn’t do anything about it.
In other words, the Jack Davis who is hoping that the third time is a charm in his bid for Congress is not much different from the Davis who ran in 2004 and 2006.
He’s still centering his campaign on a promise to take his fight against unfair trade to the nation’s capital, saying he will be “the agitator” who Washington lacks to take on powerful interests that are shipping American jobs overseas.
But apart from that vow, he’s still taking stands that others might find agitating.
Asked about Davis’ idea to bus inner-city youths out to farm country, Henry L. Taylor, head of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo, said: “I’m not so much offended by it as I recognize it as a very dangerous kind of suggestion that seeks to turn back the clock by creating a neo-peonage system.”
Nevertheless, Davis is undeterred. He said the government, churches or farmers could develop a program to bus inner-city residents to farm country, thereby helping to solve the problem of illegal immigration.
“If we take away the magnet of good-paying jobs from illegals, they’ll go home,” Davis said in an interview with The Buffalo News this week. “If they can’t make a good living here, they’ll go home.”
Reducing the number of illegal immigrants is key to protecting American culture from the divisiveness that has beset Canada, Davis said.
“Canada’s had a problem with its French-speaking people. That country’s almost split up,” Davis said. “Something like that could occur here.”
Fighting free trade
Davis’ concerns about illegal immigration are of a piece with the central plank of his platform: a dramatic crackdown on America’s decades-old embrace of free trade.
“I think Jack would be an aggressive, real person in Congress,” pressing for the rights of American workers, said Shawn Borgosz of Depew, who has worked for Davis’ company, I Squared R Element, for 11 years. “He’s a businessman. He’s away from special-interest influence.”
Warning, as he has in his previous campaigns, that free-trade policies are killing the nation’s manufacturing jobs, Davis proposes a series of tariffs on foreign goods to level the playing field.
“That’s the only way you can control trade, and that’s the way we did it up until 1930,” Davis said. “We didn’t even have an income tax up until 1930. It was all tariff income.”
Actually, a history of the U. S. tax system on the Treasury Department’s Web site notes that the first income tax was imposed in 1861, and many historians point to tariffs, along with the 1929 stock market crash and a subsequent run of bank failures, as one of the root causes of the Great Depression.
But Davis blames it all on the banks. And if that’s contrarian thinking, that’s nothing out of the ordinary for Davis.
For example, he stands far from the Democratic Party orthodoxy on two of its key issues: taxes and health care.
Backs Bush tax cuts
Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee whom Davis has endorsed, proposes repealing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy and replacing them with lower-and middle-income tax cuts.
In contrast, Davis said: “I think the government is already overtaxing the people so I don’t want to make any changes. Eliminating [the Bush] tax cuts would be a tax increase.”
Similarly, when asked whether Obama or McCain, the Republican candidate for president, had a better health care plan, he said, “I don’t know. We’ll see what works out in Congress.”
Davis dismissed health care as among the “side issues” that he hasn’t focused on in the campaign, but he made clear that he has strong opinions on the twin issues of energy and climate change that fall far from the party line.
While other Democrats tout the “green collar” jobs that could result from expanded alternative energy sources, Davis worries that solar and wind power are costly and unreliable. Instead, he’s a strong proponent of nuclear energy and drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“It was very ignorant of the people not to want to drill in our country over the last 20 years,” Davis said. “And look what it’s done to us. We have a $100 billion transfer of wealth to oil-producing countries.”
Regarding climate change, Davis said: “I don’t think man is making it and I don’t think man has the capability and certainly can’t afford the cost of trying to control it.”
Asked what is causing global warming, Davis noted that the polar ice caps on Mars are melting, too, and said: “The sun is on a heat streak.”
If so, the sun is not unlike the race between Davis, Iraq War veteran Jon Powers and environmental lawyer Alice Kryzan in New York’s 26th Congressional District. The Davis and Powers campaigns have spent weeks spewing invective at each other, and lately Kryzan has been turning up the heat on Powers, too.
For Davis, the most embarrassing moment of the race came with the revelation that he had hired the wives of the Independence Party chairmen in Erie and Monroe counties in an effort to court the party leaders.
In Davis’ view, the hiring of the two politically wired wives was “an investment like I’ve invested in other things, to get elected,” Davis said.
But he also concedes it was a mistake. Asked if it was a staff decision or if he knew about it beforehand, Davis said: “It was a staff decision. I knew it. Sometimes you should know to not listen to your staff. Sometimes you live to regret not saying no.”
Davis also sounds like he regrets not campaigning more vigorously in his 2006 race against Reynolds, a Clarence Republican who narrowly beat him last time out.
Creature of habit
So now Davis — a creature of habit who acknowledges having lunch at Mary’s, an Akron diner, practically every day since 1982 — has radically changed his approach to politics. This time, in addition to flooding the airwaves with commercials, he’s holding news conferences and visiting senior centers, marching in parades and shaking hands with voters.
And it will all be worth it if he gets elected to Congress, where Davis said he would finally have the platform he’s been seeking to pressure lawmakers — and the next president — to do right by America’s factory workers and farmers.
“When I am there, I will have a soapbox I don’t have now,” he said. “The Buffalo News will publish my articles instead of once a year, hopefully once a week. Hopefully so will other people.”
