[Ed Gordon:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. Going against the Bush administration's wishes, last week the House of Representatives voted to maintain the Hope VI public housing program in the federal budget. A young up-and-coming Democrat from Alabama, Arturo Davis, played a key role in sustaining the program, but it still faces obstacles. Congressman Davis spoke with NPR's Farai Chideya before the House voted. He explained why he was willing to put his political clout on the line to keep Hope VI alive.
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Well, Hope VI has been an enormously important program for renovating inner-city communities and for bringing vitality and health back to a lot of those communities over the last 15 or 16 years. It was initially a bipartisan project. It was started under Bush 41. HUD Secretary Jack Kemp was the instigator of the program. And for about 16 years the program has had enormous bipartisan support from Congress. Unfortunately, the last several years, the Bush administration has tried to not just cut the program, but to do away with it altogether. And the last two years the president was unsuccessful. The president proposed no new money for Hope VI. Congress restored funding the last two years. This year, the president, for the third time, has tried to do away with Hope VI, and the Transportation, Treasury and Housing Appropriations bill does not contain any provision for Hope VI. That's a big disappointment to those of us who care about economic development in the inner city and that's why we played a major role in leading this fight. My district alone has three Hope VI projects that we've gotten in the last six years. These projects have had an enormous impact around the country. FARAI CHIDEYA reporting When you talk about these projects that are in your district, paint us a picture of what they look like. Give us a sense of who lives there. Well, Hope VI targets public housing projects, to revitalize them, to turn them into mixed-income dwellings. People aren't displaced. The people who live there are given the first opportunity to stay. But they're physically renovated so they look like more conventional, modern town homes, which draws young professionals, which draws families back into the community, and which also creates a basis for businesses to relocate near the area. So what you get from a Hope VI project is an area that's often been blighted and neglected is physically transformed into a vibrant center of city life. We think it's important to get Hope VI funded at some level so that we keep the program going and that we get additional projects in the pipeline.
[Chideya:] Let's turn a little bit to some of your background and history. You grew up in a family where you didn't have a ton of money, ended up going to Harvard, going into private practice, and then, when you were elected, you beat out a fairly traditional, old-school African-American Democrat, the first Democratic African-American representative since Reconstruction. Did you burn some bridges when you ran against an incumbent?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Oh, I don't think that we burned any bridges with the voters in our district. The reality is that whenever you run for Congress against an incumbent, most incumbents tend to view their positions as their job, and they tend to view their position as something they're gonna fight very hard to hold on to. The district is still in very strong Democratic hands, and I think the district has a representative in myself who's committed to issues at the core of the Democratic Party: lifting up the conditions of people who've been left behind; giving people help when they need it; giving them a fair shot at opportunity in this society. I consider those to be the values of the Democratic Party and those are the values I've been fighting for since I've been in Congress.
[Chideya:] How do you, as a congressman who's part of a minority party, advocate for these quality-of-life issues for jobs when you are not in power?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Well, make no mistake, it's been a very, very difficult task for those of us who have a certain set of values for America to prevail in the last couple sessions of Congress. The Republican majority in Congress has a very different vision of America, and Hope VI is a good example of that. I firmly believe that you can make a difference by engaging particular issues and by challenging Republicans to make their rhetoric fit their votes. We did it two years ago when President Bush tried to cut funding for black land-grant colleges like Alabama A&M and Tuskegee University in my state. We managed to get Congress to pass an amendment restoring that funding. We managed to get Congress to expand the child tax credit for working-class families. So I'm a very strong believer that if you find some issues that you can press, and you can challenge Republicans on their own rhetoric, if you can challenge them to make their votes and their rhetoric catch up, you can make a difference every now and then. But, obviously, this has been a long and difficult fight for Democrats.
[Chideya:] Let's talk a little bit more about the Democratic Party. You are often grouped with a new generation of African-American leadership, including Harold Ford and Barack Obama, that try to promote a big-tent theory of how the Democrats should reach out to America as opposed to perhaps a more traditionally partisan one. Do you agree with that assessment, and is it a strength or a weakness in a highly partisan atmosphere to try to be a centrist?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Well, I reject a little bit the generational argument because I think that the generational divide-you can find younger politicians who embrace inclusive politics, you can find younger politicians who don't embrace the politics of inclusion, and the same with politicians who are on the other side of the generational divide. I think the real division is not so much whether or not you're born after 1960 or after 1965; the real division is what your experiences have been and how you can use those experiences to serve the people that you represent. I'm a very strong believer that for Democrats to regain the House and Senate, to take the White House back, we've obviously got to find out how we can reach out to people who have not been voting for Democrats. That's self-evident. And we can't just be a party that bashes what the Republicans do without having some constructive alternative to put on the table. We have to have our own compelling vision of what this country ought to be and I think we've gotten one. We're a party that believes that if you work in this country, you ought to have a shot at opportunity, you ought to have a shot at health care, you ought to have a shot at being able to take care of your family and send your kids to college, and we understand that government can play a role in making those things happen. Final point that I'll make is that those of us who are trying to push the Democratic Party forward recognize that we have to be a commonsense party. We have to be a party that speaks to people's basic sense of values and their basic sense of what our country ought to be. We're a country that believes in fair play for people. We're a country that believes if you work hard, you ought to be rewarded for that. We're not a country that believes in government of the privileged, by the privileged and for the privileged, and that's what we've had the last four years. But we have to be direct about those things, and we have to paint this picture for the American people if we're going to be successful.
[Chideya:] Before we let you go, I want to do two things. First of all, want to ask you about some of the other legislation you've been involved in, or the votes. You took a strong stand on flag-burning, saying that though you thought it was odious, that it was constitutional and part of the government. You were trying to increase the amount of money to preserve cord blood for future stem-cell research. What do those decisions say about how you operate in this highly partisan world of left and right? What kind of vision are you trying to shape?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Well, I voted against the flag-burning amendment, which is not a popular vote with everyone in the state of Alabama, but this is the reality. We have all kinds of offensive and outrageous speech in our society. I'm offended when someone burns a cross. I'm offended when someone displays the swastika. I'm offended when people use racial slurs to try to demean people. But we permit all that discussion, we permit all of those symbols, not because we like them, but because we believe in the First Amendment. We believe that even the worst ideas in our country ultimately will be pushed down by the better ideas. Only weak societies need flag-burning amendments. Only weak societies need to hold up symbols and to say that we value the symbol more than the substance of the symbol. We're a strong enough country that we don't need to do that. We've marginalized people who hate our country. We marginalize people who burn flags. They're not a part of the respectable political discourse, and we've won this argument, and we don't need to amend our Constitution. As far as the cord-blood bill goes, I'm a supporter of stem-cell research. I'm also a supporter of cord-blood research. We've learned in the last several years that the umbilical cords can be used-rather than being discarded, they can be used for blood transfusions, they can be used for important research, and they're very important for combatting diseases like sickle-cell anemia, so I was fortunate that a few months ago I was the lead Democrat on a bill that passed the House 431-to-1 that will lead to expanded federal research and expanded availability of cord blood cells. The broader point I'll make about my voting record is that, on the overwhelming majority of issues facing this country, there's not a simple liberal or conservative solution. A lot of the issues are packaged on liberal or conservative dynamic, but on the basic questions of how you educate our children, how you provide adequate health care, how you provide the right balance between environment and growing jobs, the answers aren't easily packaged on a liberal or conservative bias. So my obligation is to try to find some way to move toward commonsense solutions on the problems that impact people in my state and my district.
[Chideya:] Final question: You have been written about as someone who could be a contender for statewide office, whether that was the governorship or perhaps moving up into the Senate from the US House of Representatives. But David Bositis, who is with the Joint Center in Washington, a think tank that analyzes black participation in politics, said, `Alabama hasn't made it to the 20th century, let alone the 21st.'Now in terms of allowing an African-American to be considered for that prominent a role, do you believe, as David Bositis says, that Alabama is just not ready for you to go any further than you are?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Oh, I think those of us from Alabama, are used to people underestimating our state. I think those of us from Alabama are used to people doubting our capacity to move forward and we've been dealing with that for years. When John Lewis and Martin Luther King mobilized the people of Selma to demand their voting rights, they were told that Selma was the wrong place to go, the people of Selma were too passive to stand up; they were told there was no way that Alabama would ever bend. When Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth attempted to mobilize the people of Birmingham to resist segregation, they were told that Birmingham was the most segregated city in America and would never change. I'm used to people doubting the state of Alabama. If I decide to make a run for the governorship or the Senate seat, A, that wouldn't be in any scenario that I can see until 2010, but if I decide to do that, it will be with the conviction that if you talk about the right issues, if you talk about issues that matter to people, they will give you an opening. And I would submit that Alabama is not fundamentally different from Tennessee or Maryland or Illinois. The reality is that-or Virginia, which elected Wilder. The reality is that whenever black candidates run breakthrough races, they're always expected to fail at the outset. No one expected that Wilder would win in Virginia. When my friend, Barack Obama, ran for the Senate in Illinois, his prospects were widely dismissed. The reality is that people rarely see the potential of a breakthrough until it's on the eve of happening.
[Chideya:] All right. Well, we are going to keep an eye on that issue and an eye on you. Democratic Congressman Arturo Davis represents Alabama's 7th District. Thank you for joining us.
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Thank you.
[Chideya:] Farai Chideya, NPR News.
[Ed Gordon:] This is NPR News.