The slow but steady metamorphosis of Artur Davis from Democrat to Republican is now complete.
The former Democratic congressman from Alabama, an early and enthusiastic endorser of Barack Obama, announced this week that he is formally leaving the party to become a Republican--and is considering a bid for office in Virginia.
“Wearing a Democratic label no longer matches what I know about my country and its possibilities,” Davis wrote on his website.
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Less than four years earlier, Davis had given one of the nominating speeches for Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention.
His remarkable transformation, however, has not been sudden. For months, the onetime rising Democratic star--who lost a bid to be Alabama’s governor as a Democrat--has been talking and acting more like a Republican, writing for the conservative National Review, including one January column that called on the GOP to draft former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush into the presidential field.
Davis has steadily refused to shoot down rumors that he aspires to run for office again, in Virginia and as a Republican. But this week, he admitted that, “If I were to run, it would be as a Republican,” although he was uncertain he would take the plunge.
He was more tentative about whether or where he would run, suggesting that he has looked at “one of the Northern Virginia congressional districts in 2014 or 2016, or alternatively, for a seat in the Virginia legislature in 2015.”
“If that sounds imprecise,” he wrote, “it’s a function of how uncertain political opportunities can be—and if that sounds expedient, never lose sight of the fact that politics is not wishfulness, it’s the execution of a long, draining process to win votes and help and relationships while your adversaries are working just as hard to tear down the ground you build.”
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