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A pair of Alabama yellow hammers, otherwise known as the Northern Flicker [colaptes auratus], visited the back yard to feed on Sunday. I have been trying to get pictures of this pair for years. They finally cooperated today. Maybe they were so hungry they didn’t pay me much mind.

While you can see the yellow tail feather in the shot up in the tree, where you would expect to find a woodpecker, see the shot on the ground below. According to scientists, flickers eat mainly ants and beetles, digging for them with their unusual, slightly curved bill. These seemed to be interested in the nuts all over the ground. There are so many this year the squirrels have not been able to bury them all to store up for the winter.

Out West, these woodpeckers tend to have a few partially hidden red tail feathers, thus the name red-shafted flicker. In the South, they have yellow tail feathers, which you can only see from certain angles, so they are often called yellow-shafted flickers.

These birds have a special place in state lore going all the way back to the Civil War, and it is the state bird of Alabama.

More below…

Glynn Wilson

Click on the images for a larger view

Alabama has been known as the “Yellowhammer State” since the Civil War. The yellowhammer nickname was given to the Confederate soldiers from Alabama when a company of young cavalry soldiers from Huntsville, under the command of Rev. D.C. Kelly, arrived at Hopkinsville, Kentucky, where Gen. Forrest’s troops were stationed. The officers and men of the Huntsville company wore fine, new uniforms, whereas the soldiers who had long been on the battlefields were dressed in faded, worn uniforms.

On the sleeves, collars and coattails of the new calvary troops were bits of brilliant yellow cloth. As the company rode past Company A, Will Arnett cried out in greeting “Yellowhammer, Yellowhammer, flicker, flicker!” The greeting brought a roar of laughter from the men and from that moment the Huntsville soldiers were spoken of as the “yellowhammer company.” The term quickly spread throughout the Confederate Army and all Alabama troops were referred to unofficially as the “Yellowhammers.”

When the Confederate Veterans in Alabama were organized they took pride in being referred to as the “Yellowhammers” and wore a yellowhammer feather in their caps or lapels during reunions. A bill introduced in the 1927 legislature by Representative Thomas E. Martin, Montgomery County, was passed and approved by Governor Bibb Graves on September 6, 1927, making it the state bird.

The tradition extends to the University of Alabama, where the famous Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer cheer has been around for decades. It bas banned in 2003, but students voted overwhelmingly at Homecoming 2005 to bring it back.

The “Rammer Jammer” was an old campus magazine at Alabama, and the yellowhammer is the state bird.

It is sort of appropriate this year, don’t you think?

Hey Auburn!
Hey Auburn!
Hey Auburn!
We just beat the hell out of you!
Rammer Jammer, Yellowhammer, gave ‘em hell, Alabama!

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Ahh, October.

Yes, I was born in the middle of October, making me a balanced personality in the Libra scales tradition (not unlike the scales of justice). But that’s not why October is my favorite month of the year.

It’s the cooler temperatures, the low humidity — and light that is just right for snapping digital pictures of migrating birds.

Glynn Wilson

The bad news is, we are only a month away from another election that promises to be another example of a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, and there does not seem to be a damn thing I can do about it.

That phenomenon has been an American tradition so long it dates back 150 years to the Civil War, when dirt poor Southerners went off to fight the “Yankees” for the slave-owning plantation owners who wanted to preserve one of the most corrupt economies and ways of life in world history.

The election on the horizon for November 2 is shaping up as a “billionaires’ coup” camouflaged as a “populist surge,” according to Frank Rich of the New York Times.

The so-called tea party is getting all the attention from the mainstream, corporate news media, and the pollsters are saying the Republicans will likely take back control of the U.S. House of Representatives at the very least. Will the American people really put the “party of no” back in power in Washington? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile down here in Alabamaland, once known as the “Heart of Dixie” and the “Cradle of the Confederacy,” a most bizarre thing is afoot. Since people seem to have such short memories, perhaps a little history is in order.

Abraham Lincoln, the president who was assassinated for starting the Civil War to preserve the Union and for abolishing slavery in the land where all men were presumed to be “created equal,” was a Republican, y’all. That’s why the South was one-party Democrat for a century. The tea party anger should be directed at Republicans, in other words, not Democrats. If they only knew…

So why are poor southerners so fired up to vote for Republicans in November?

Because of the power of political myth and spin.

Ronald Reagan’s handlers Michael Deaver and Lee Atwater managed to create a new reality for Southerners in the 1980s, perpetuating the myth that Republicans are the party of “less government” and “lower taxes.” Never mind that Reagan raised taxes and never shrank the federal government by a single man.

The myth was so powerful (because Rush Limbaugh said so on the radio) that not even one of the most successful presidents in American history could reverse the trend. Bill Clinton ended his second term as president with a booming economy and a budget surplus. Remember the “peace dividend?” But he got a BJ in the Oval Office, so he was the worst president ever. Right.

No matter. George W. Bush got the votes of Southerners in 2000 by making the same false promises, and down here, they still don’t realize it was his fault the world economy nearly collapsed in 2007. Perhaps if the government had done what Southerners wanted and not bailed out the banks, insurance companies and car companies in 2008 and 2009, their diet of shoe leather would have convinced some Southerners to vote for Democrats for a change.

The problem is, there are no Democrats running for any office in Alabama who can articulate what the problem is and what needs to be done about it. Most of the Democrats on the ballot in November are running to the right of the Republicans, embracing conservatism and the politics of Jesus as if they had any chance whatsoever of getting conservative Christians to vote for a Democrat.

News flash for Democrats. The tea party and Christian Coalition voters are hard corps Republicans and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

True, Ron Sparks, the Democratic Party’s nominee for governor, has a plan to save the state’s schools and economy by taxing and regulating gambling, and he might have been able to get some votes for that. The problem is, the Obama administration has not cleaned house in Montgomery, so we are still stuck with the Bush Justice Department in this state. Which means we may see more indictments of Democrats before the Nov. 2 election, handing the legislature to the Republicans for the first time since the Reconstruction period right after the Civil War.

Since the campaigns are locked into their plans and strategies already, it is too late for a last minute course correction. But what the heck? Here’s my final suggestions on how the Democrats could have saved themselves from disaster in November.

What if the Democrats had shown the cajones to capitalize on public discontent over the corporate culture that caused the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and pointed out in a teachable moment to potential voters the connections between corporate deregulation, the Republican Party, the Alabama Supreme Court and the mess in the Gulf?

Like I said, it’s too late now.

Here’s one last suggestion, which I am sure will also fall on deaf ears.

There is a myth circulating in Montgomery that since 58 percent of Alabamians tell pollsters they go to church on Sunday, the only way to win elections in the state is to go after the church vote. Nationally, church attendance has been falling for decades, and it may very well be that people lie to pollsters on a question like that. (Ask any pollster and they will tell you this is true. People lie on moral questions).

I suspect the number of people who actually go to church is much lower, especially since a number of those folks are probably hung over from drinking the night before, especially during football season.

According to the Gallup Poll, 67 percent of adults in the U.S. admit consuming alcohol, and beer remains the favorite beverage of Americans. (The number who actually drink is much higher, since people lie about that too).

In any event, the data prove there are more drinkers than there are church goers, so what a potent political constituency?

Political pundits on cable television news talk shows are always talking about whether politicians such as Bush or President Barack Obama are the kind of guy the average American would like to sit around with and “drink a beer.”

Due to his waning popularity, President Obama has recently began attending backyard barbecues to shore up his image as an average guy who drinks beer.

I know for a fact that people in bars from Huntsville in the north to the Southside of Birmingham, from Egans in Tuscaloosa to Auburn, Mobile and Gulf Shores do not think much of the Democrats in Alabama because they appear to be as conservative as the Republicans they oppose. Tens of thousands of drinkers will stay home and not vote on November 2, and that includes me.

But maybe in addition to his plan to turn Alabama into a gambling state, perhaps Ron Sparks should launch a tailgate barbecue series of Web ads of his own, showing the redneck Agricultural Commissioner from Fort Payne drinking beer with Alabama and Auburn fans on football Saturday.

Hey, it might work for some Supreme Court candidates too.

Nah! They will never do it. Alabama Democrats are so scared of being called “liberals” on TeeVee that a Republican takeover down in Montgomery appears inevitable.

See y’all in California. I am out of here.

I hear Monterey is nice year ’round, sort of like Alabama the past four days. The cold will be here soon enough, and then the global warming will be back, next year.

See ya…

The history of the Civil War has never really interested me that much compared to the American Revolution. Neither has the Great Man theory of history interested me nearly as much as the study of science and nature.

But just like in life we can’t ultimately escape death or taxes, I can’t seem to get through life as an American or a Southerner without facing the baggage left over from the Civil War — and the man-centric view of history.

I would rather be camping out in the Great Smoky Mountains photographing birds in the wild.

But since Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis has thrust this race for governor upon us a year and a half ahead of time, like a lot of men before him whose ambitions drove the agendas of their state or nation, it is impossible NOT to spend some time thinking about these things.

Proponents of the Great Man theory of history say the best way to explain things is by studying the stories of political and military heroes, influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence and wisdom or “Machiavellianism,” used power in a way that had a decisive historical impact, at least according to this brief sketch of the theory in the online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. (No, this is not my only source. I read more about it than I care to elaborate on during almost a decade as a grad student and teaching journalism at the university level. I link to this basic source here for those who may want to begin exploring the subject further on the Web.)

So for example, to understand the Civil War, a scholar might study the life and role of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee, or even Joshua Chamberlain or William C. Oates.

The Great Man theory is associated most often with 19th-century commentator and historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” reflecting his belief that heroes shape history through both their personal attributes and divine inspiration.

One of the most vitriolic critics of Carlyle’s formulation of the Great Man theory was Herbert Spencer, who believed that attributing historical events to the decisions of individuals was a hopelessly primitive, childish, and unscientific. He said the men Carlyle called “great men” were merely products of their social environments. He once wrote that, “you must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown…. Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”

Of course he is best known for coining the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which he did in Principles of Biology in 1864, during the last year of the Civil War, after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which was published 150 years ago this year. Spencer tried to extend the hard science view of evolution through natural selection into the social sciences of sociology and ethics, and he had some impact, although many of the theories derived from that line of thought have been discredited, most notably “social darwinism.”

I will be writing more about those things later on in the year. For today, however, I find myself thinking about the movie Gods and Generals, which I watched for the first time last night on late night cable.

The first in a trilogy based on the books of Jeff Shaar and funded by Ted Turner of CNN fame, the story is very much a study of the great men of the war, including the Confederate Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, played by Robert Duvall, who is from Virginia and claims to be distant kin.

In an interview on CNN, Duvall said the gods in the story are the Southern generals, “because they were pretty much superior to the generals of the North.” The “generals” are the Northern generals. The film was criticized for straying from the book and for being too favorable to the Southern side, with grandiose scenes showing Jackson and others praying for god to bless them before battle and such.

To me a more interesting story, and one dealt with to some extent in the next book and movie, Killer Angels, focuses on the hero of the Battle of Gettysburg, Col. Joshua Chamberlain, whose valiant defense of Little Round Top became the focus of many published stories over the years.

Chamberlain was an interesting and gracious philosophy professor from Maine thrust into the war like many others at the time. His leadership of the 20th Maine’s bayonet charge that routed the 15th Alabama regiment, wearing their famous yellowhammer patch, led by Col. William C. Oates, may have been the key moment in the war that saved the Union on that gray afternoon of July 2, 1863.

“At that crisis, I ordered the bayonet,” Chamberlain wrote later. “The word was enough.”

After the war, Chamberlain went back to teaching in Maine. Oates went into politics and served as governor of Alabama from 1894 to 1896. He resigned from Congress in 1894 and ran for governor in a contest that became infamous for its “double-dealing, dirty politics, and corrupt bargains,” according to histories written of the time.

Oates was known as “a conservative among conservatives.” He was a fierce opponent of immigration, organized labor, and Free Silver. Like other Southern Democrats, he detested the Populists and approved the use of fraudulent tactics to defeat them at the polls.

His racial views were typical of the patrician class in the South, despite his own humble origins, and he fully believed that African Americans were racially inferior to whites. Nevertheless, he asserted that “there are some white men who have no more right and no more business to vote than a Negro and not as much as some of them.”

Of course that was a long time ago. If only we could get past those times. I suspect we have about another decade to go here Alabama before we can get there, however.

Maybe we should use this year to extend the hand of education to the people of Alabama on the theory of evolution and the history of the Civil War so we can begin to move beyond these subjects. If Artur Davis had shown any sensitivity to these things beyond his own ambitions, we might have been sympathetic to his candidacy. As it stands, he is just another man, like the men who have fought in wars past, vying to gain his own place in history — with potentially negative consequences for the rest of us.

Was the Civil War inevitable? Was the Iraq War inevitable? Not but for the pride of men. Damn them.

Are the people of Alabama ready for an African-American governor?

by Glynn Wilson

ATLANTA, Ga. — Some historians say the final battle of the Civil War was fought at Sayler’s Creek, southwest of Petersburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1865. Try bringing that up in a political bar like Manuel’s Tavern in downtown Atlanta, however, and see how fast you can start an argument.

While everyone knows that Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the war, many an expert would argue that the old, lingering causes of the war survived in people’s attitudes long after the fighting on the bloody battle fields came to a gentlemanly end.

Ask the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, those who had to fight those battles all over again in the 1950s and ’60s.

Then there are thinkers and writers who will tell you, if you give them half a chance over a few shots of whiskey or a few pints of dark beer, that the election of George W. Bush in 2000 effectively erased the Union’s victory in the war and was finally, at long last, a victory for the old Confederacy. Putting aside the issue of election theft and the Supreme Court, ponder the idea that Bush came into office in large measure by the hands of mostly white voters from the old Confederate states of the Deep South, with some help from middle America and parts of the West.

Since Obama’s election even the TV pundits will tell you the only base left for the national Republican Party lies in the old states of the Confederacy, thanks in part to the scorched earth strategies of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, whose marches to Washington and Baghdad with Bush scarred the national character almost as much as General William Tecumseh Sherman’s fiery “March to the Sea.”

Then consider that while Bush’s campaign coffers may not have been filled by the profits from cotton, hand-picked on plantations worked by slaves, the mega corporations that mostly supported his candidacy were interested in keeping wages low and gutting the rights of juries in courtrooms to punish corporate crimes against working people, humanity and the earth. Bush got most of his money to run in 2000 from oil and other energy companies, including Exxon Mobile and Southern Company, as well as insurance companies and the pharmaceutical giants. He came into office — in the world prior to 9/11 — with the prime objective to pass national “tort reform,” the watchword for stopping juries from rendering multi-million dollar judgments against multi-national corporations.

Rove had already accomplished that feat in Alabama — once known as the top state in the country for large jury awards against corporate malfeasance — by helping the Republican Party orchestrate a political takeover of the state Supreme Court.

If you ask just about any academic expert who studies the demographic numbers from public opinion polls and election results, you could say Americans finally fought the final battle of the Civil War on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008. Symbolically, it took another Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, to put together enough of a national coalition to defeat Confederate attitudes once and for all.

Jim Gundlach, a retired Auburn Sociology professor, harbors a special fascination for the “age” variable in public opinion research, mainly for the story it tells on an issue like public attitudes on race and the chances of electing African-American candidates to national and statewide office.

He ran the model on Obama’s candidacy before the election and predicted that the best he could possibly do in a national race was to win by about 7 percent, if he ran a flawless campaign and the other side stumbled (can you say Sarah Palin?). And Obama hit the number almost right on the dot, winning by about 7 percent nationally in the popular vote.

Glynn Wilson

Rep. Artur Davis in Birmingham recently…

If you run the same model in a state like Alabama, where Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis is making noises about running for governor, what you find is that the state is at least a decade away from fighting the final battle of the Civil War. It will take that long, according to the numbers, for the younger and more progressive population to overtake the older diehards on the race issue, who will finally die off in substantial enough numbers for a black man to have a chance of moving into the governor’s mansion in Montgomery, in the city where the Confederacy was launched in 1861.

“People do not change their minds on core issues in their lifetimes,” Gundlach says. “That’s a fact.”

Fiefdom vs. Merit System

To make an even broader point about the state of the country from the data, America is just now situated demographically to be ready to throw off the idea of government by fiefdom. That is, where all the president’s or governor’s brownnosers get all the jobs, the classic patronage or spoils system.

Bush ran the country like a monarchy, where loyal subjects had to kiss the president-king’s ring to gain favor in court. All they had to do for their appointments, especially at the Justice Department, was to show a Federalist Society membership card at the door, along with a copy of their GOP campaign contributions — and a letter from a preacher. Obama is already moving to what academics might call a model of “liberal bureaucracy,” where merit and excellence matter.

Obama’s team is conducting national searches for members of his administration and appointing people who have unique qualifications for the jobs. He has already shown he will appoint people who have disagreed with him in the past. Take his appointment of Hillary Clinton at the State Department. Even after a sometimes bitterly fought campaign with the Clinton’s taking direct jabs at Obama’s qualifications and fitness for the highest office in the land, once the campaign ended, he is bringing even his most bitter political enemies into the tent with him, much like Lincoln did after he won the election of 1860.

In many ways, Alabama is still stuck in a model of government set up under the fiefdom of George Corley Wallace. And look what happened at Auburn when Bobby Lowder had a chance to change things, but ran it like his own fiefdom. The result was not, let’s just say, what you would call excellence, even on the football field.

While there are those involved in state government who realize this is the case, Alabama is yet to reform its outdated 1901 constitution, and it may be years before other reforms are even possible here. In the year 2000, Alabama became the last state in the country to repeal a century-old ban against interracial marriage, an unenforceable but embarrassing throwback to the state’s segregationist past. But consider that a little more than 40 percent of the population still voted to keep the ban in place.

That is a clear indicator to an expert such as Gundlach that Artur Davis is trying to fight the final battle of the Civil War in Alabama a bit too soon — a decade too soon.

Plus, Gundlach said, in testing the waters so far, Davis has not shown that he has really thought through what it might take to win, or revealed the details of any plan he might have for what he could do to “move the state forward” from the governor’s office.

When confronted on the question recently at the Civil Rights Institute in downtown Birmingham, Davis would not sit still to take and answer many questions about his plans. He will say simply that the best office from which to “move the state forward” is the governor’s office.

“He has thought about it to the depth of coming up with a campaign slogan, which is on par with Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism,’” Gundlach said. “Bush had no idea what compassionate conservatism would be, but he knew it sounded good, or Rove did anyway. I just don’t see in Davis’s background providing him with the insights to have the levers to make Alabama work to change.”

While Gundlach is retired now and can speak his mind without fear of professional reprisal, there are a number of people involved in the Alabama Democratic Party who have expressed alarm about a Davis candidacy who would not speak openly on the record. Reliable sources confirm that four of the top Democratic leaders in the state legislature recently met with Davis to try to talk him out of running. Even the powers among the trial lawyers, the chief fund raising mechanism for the Democratic Party along with the Alabama Education Association, are trying to talk him out of it. Some sources say Davis is trying to figure out a graceful way to bow out now that he has all but tossed his hat into the ring. A new trial balloon out today indicates Davis is now being screened for a job in the Obama administration.

As evidence that Davis could not win the Democratic Party primary, much less the general election, experts on Alabama politics point to the recent presidential election results. About 80 percent of white voters in the state voted for McCain-Palin, even declared Democrats. But that does not tell the whole story. It wasn’t just the race issue that caused many in the state not to vote for Obama. It was the power of the Internet, where messages were passed from one computer to many more with the false rumor that Obama was a “Muslim” and a “terrorist” and that his birth certificate from Hawaii was “inauthentic.” Numerous contacts with people in this state, including long-time union members and Yellow Dog Democrats from days gone by, confirm that people believed those things, wanted to believe them.

Davis is a single man who holds a safe seat in a Congressional district gerrymandered to be a majority black district. He could hold that seat for life if he wanted to, and do great things for the state, while getting to work every day in that beautiful U.S. Capitol building in D.C. His statewide name recognition is not great, however. To position himself to win a statewide race, he has announced plans to marry in January. But would that stop the right-wing attack machine from going after him over the Internet in a statewide race if he were to win the primary? Probably not.

And while Davis gained some recognition for his role on the House Judiciary Committee in the investigation of the political prosecution of former governor Don Siegelman, indications are since the presidential election he has joined a camp in Washington, D.C., which supposedly includes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who would rather not continue the investigations of crimes by Bush administration officials — including Karl Rove’s contempt of Congress and obstruction of justice for the destruction of documents, including e-mail messages.

When confronted with the question, Davis will not say what position HE takes. He will only indicate it’s up to the chairman of the committee.

“I’ll let John Conyers decide what to do about that,” he said. “I don’t know what Conyers is going to do.”

Davis tried to claim credit for being the one to “unearth” GOP whistle-blower Jill Simpson and to take her testimony before the committee staff, although he never called her or anyone else from Montgomery to testify before the full committee, except for Birmingham attorney Doug Jones, who represented Siegelman early on in the case. Jones was quoted beforehand in The Locust Fork News-Journal and the Progressive Populist newspaper out of Austin, Texas, in an article that made it’s way into the Congressional record.

Some Democrats say Davis had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” into the investigation, and to get a green light from Alabama Power Company to do it. Davis said the committee did ask for a contempt citation against Karl Rove, but he blamed it on “the leadership” in the House for not scheduling a vote in the full Congress. He said there would be time in the next Congress to continue the investigation, as indicated by the Senate Judiciary Committee press secretary in a recent story. But he would not give a clear indication he is pushing the issue.

“Look, I think everybody — except The Birmingham News – knew there was a taint and a cloud of suspicion around the Siegelman prosecution all along,” Davis said. He said “it will be up to the Eleventh U.S. Circuit of Appeals in Atlanta to decide the fate of Siegelman and Scrushy,” although he indicated the court’s decision could influence Congress in its investigation.

For his lack of a clear stance on that, and the recent information that has come to light about his close ties to Bill and Leura Canary in Montgomery, Davis has angered many of Siegelman’s supporters. And now charges are flying that Davis actually protected both Bill Canary, the head of the conservative Business Council of Alabama, and his wife Leura, the U.S. attorney who brought charges against Siegelman in Montgomery, by not pushing for them to be called or subpoenaed to testify before the committee in Washington. Attorneys across the state are still talking about the allegation that Davis is trying to figure out a way to help keep Canary on as U.S. attorney in Montgomery, even though Davis recently denied it on a left-wing political blog rather than offer direct answers to our questions.

Financial disclosure forms show that Davis has taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions form the Canaries over the years, far more than other Democrats. An analysis of his campaign contributions also reveals that only 8 percent of his money comes from Alabama, while much of it comes from New York and the lobby associated with the PAC advocating for the State of Israel.

[See the campaign contributions from Canary to Davis from the OpenSource.org site in this PDF file]

Also see:
Davis Ties to AIPAC and Israel

Rep. Davis helped by group tied to spy case

The Birmingham News has already run one column making fun of Davis for being a “dot dot dot Ivy Leaguer, ” a jab at the fact that he is a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School.

To his credit, that is one of the reasons he’s considered about the only politician from Alabama right now with a future in Washington by the powers that be in D.C. and New York. But the question is, how will that play in Alabama in the governor’s race of 2010?

When Davis speaks in D.C., what they see is an educated man of 41 who is one of them in a sense, a Harvard man, who has a chance to be a top leader in the House one day — or even the Senate.

Whenever Jeff Sessions gets up to speak on the Senate floor, on the other hand, sources say the other senators just smirk and leave the room. Senator Richard Shelby, who is now in the national spotlight for his stance opposing the Bush administration’s plan to offer a short-term loan to stop the utter collapse of the American automobile manufacturing industry, is seen simply as a good old boy. In apparently trying to position himself as a conservative Democrat, Davis also voted against the bailout bill in the House, although it passed anyway but stalled in the Senate due to the opposition from Shelby and his fellow Republicans.

Siegelman, as a Rhodes Scholar who held every statewide elective office over a two decade political career, was the rising star in the Alabama Democratic Party. But Karl Rove’s election theft in 2002 and the Bush Justice Department’s political prosecution beginning in 2005 derailed his climb.

There were some minor political players in Alabama who thought Governor Bob Riley had a chance at the national stage. They touted him as a vice presidential contender for the McCain campaign. Sources close to the McCain campaign say he was never seriously considered, however, since there was no way they were going to take a chance on Riley or anyone else from here because of the perception that the Alabama Republican Party is such a “cesspool of corruption” due to the political prosecutions and other issues related to defense contracts.

Davis will get a fairly prominent mention in a book due out soon about a new generation of black leaders emerging in the post-Civil Rights era. Public Television’s Gwen Ifill’s first book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, is scheduled to be released January 20, 2009 — Inauguration Day. It will profile several African-American politicians, including Davis and a couple of his Harvard cohorts, Obama and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

Some of the key players in the downtown Birmingham Democratic Party say Davis is jealous of their success, while he is still just one Congressman among 435 other members. Davis puts on a show of denying it, but he does act like someone who craves executive authority.

Will the fame from the book, his friendship with Obama and his forays around the state be enough to propel Davis into the governor’s office in Alabama, or even enough to help him win the Democratic Party’s primary in 2010?

Most political experts in Alabama, including state party officials, say even if Davis were to win the party’s nomination, a long shot at best, that would just hand the election to the Republicans and guarantee a GOP takeover of the legislature in 2010. It would split the party apart, and bring what’s left of the racist population out of the woodwork against him, like the crowd that showed up in great numbers when McCain chose a lightening rod like Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate.

Glynn Wilson

Democratic Party Chairman Joe Turnham

Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Joe Turnham, who is already in a public brawl with Davis over who should have standing to recommend political appointments to the incoming Obama administration, said a Davis candidacy for governor would “virtually kills us in down-the-ballot races.” He said Davis has every right to run, but he wonders if that would be best for the party or the state.

Some sources say the stance Davis is taking on that issue is a direct challenge to Joe Reed, who holds powerful sway over Democratic Party politics in Montgomery and who openly supported Hillary Clinton for president early on. He even refused to switch his support to Obama leading up to the convention in Denver this summer until the last minute. When given an opportunity to say something about the governor’s race while attending the appeal hearing for Siegelman in Atlanta this week, however, Reed was not his usual outspoken self.

Glynn Wilson

Joe Reed in Atlanta

“I think anybody who wants to run should run,” he said, a departure from what he’s been quoted as saying in other newspapers in recent weeks.

Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom Jr. is not talking much about it yet, but he is running for sure, sources close to the former governor say. He’s already said he will make an announcement of his intention to run in January. If Folsom runs, Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks will not run, sources say, since awhile back he made such a promise to the son of “Big Jim” Folsom, the legendary Populist governor in the 1940s and ’50s.

Folsom has that same good-old-boy exterior of politicians from Alabama’s past such as Senator Howell Heflin. But those who know him best say he possesses a certain political wisdom, even though he’s sometimes slow to act. The business community sees him as someone you can do business with. It seems almost forgotten that he was governor and the first to sit down in another tavern over a German beer when the first automobile plant decided to locate in the state, the Mercedes plant that came to Vance and started the transformation of the state’s economy around the automobile manufacturing industry. Plus, Folsom’s wife Marsha is also seen as someone who would be a smart and effective First Lady, who could help him carry the day over a wide-open Republican field of lesser known candidates.

Bradley Byrne, the head of Alabama’s two-year college system, could be considered as Gov. Bob Riley’s heir apparent on the Republican side. Although sources close to Riley say he is not closing the door on his son Rob, who will have to make the decision himself. Rob Riley had ambitions to run for the seat in 2006 before his dad chose to run for re-election. Birmingham attorney Luther Strange has been mentioned, although he might be more likely to run for Attorney General to replace Troy King, who may run for governor, although it’s doubtful he could win considering the enemies he’s made. Sources say Tim James, the son of former Alabama Governor Fob James, is definitely running, although they say he is not likely to top his 8 percent performance from last time. Troy University Chancellor Jack Hawkins may also jump into the race, as well as “Yella Man” Jimmy Rane and state Treasurer Kay Ivey.

Charles Barkley is still a wild card, but he’s said publicly he has pushed his ambitions back to 2014.

If Davis does not find a graceful way out of the race soon, and if he decides to try and win the final battle of the Civil War in Alabama perhaps a decade too soon, the big cannons of media fire will surely invade the old Heart of Dixie one more time to watch the show. But Davis might have to appeal to his friend Obama for some help from the Secret Service.

Davis’s chief of staff in his Birmingham office has told everyone who has come calling that Davis will be fine.

“We will go to every little town all over the state, and when they meet him, they will like him,” he is quoted as saying.

But astute observers of the scene say Davis might better watch out in some places in the state, such as Jackson County, where there are still active chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. They are none too happy about the election of the first black president of the United States. If faced with the prospects of an African-American governor, the old Wallace crowd may just be ready to don the old gray colors with the yellow hammer on the sleeve, raise the Confederate battle flag high — and fight that old Civil War battle one more time.

Is Davis truly prepared for that? Or would it be better for everyone involved to save the final battle for a future day, a day when the demographic numbers show it’s really time, finally, for Alabama to move on and out of its Dixie past?

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