The full story has not yet been published about last week's rout of favored Democratic candidate Artur Davis in the Alabama gubernatorial primary.
Little-known Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks ran to the left of the better-funded Davis and trounced him by a 62-38 margin.
This is even though Davis was his state's senior Democratic congressman and enjoyed a close relationship with President Obama, whose Harvard Law School studies overlapped by a year.
The corporate-owned media know that the Davis defeat is big news, as shown by two stories in the June 6 Washington Post alone, here and here.
But this is mostly horse-race coverage about winning.
The MSM are reluctant to scrutinize the substantive issues, the campaign's deep intrigues, or the White House view that it should recruit Republican-lite careerists like Davis for open seats in conservative or swing districts. Most of these stories are about as appetizing as a cake that lacks salt or sugar.
My take:
In one of the reddest of the red states, Sparks ran an issue-oriented campaign that offered solutions to the hopes and fears of voters threatened by further job loss and inadequate health care. Voters were enticed by Sparks advocacy of gambling as a job-creator and source of government funding. And, most recently, many feared the horror of the BP's oil drilling catastrophe.
Furthermore, significant segments of the Democratic base suspected Davis of making self-serving deals with their Republican enemies to help his own career.
True, Davis was burdened also as an African-American running in the onetime "Cradle of the Confederacy," which also has the highest white population percentage of any Deep South state.
But this was not a race-determined election. Sparks managed to beat Davis in many heavily African-American districts. Some were within his opponent's congressional district, which has been gerrymandered to include Birmingham with the rural Black Belt to help minority candidates.
Last Wednesday, I wrote, Why Alabama Democrats Rejected Centrist Artur Davis, Obama's Pal. The story noted that Sparks won the support of all four of the state's major black political organizations while Davis was winning endorsements for the primary from reliably Republican major newspapers.
Alabama Democratic Conference Chairman Dr. Joe Reed, for instance, was quoted as saying:
It's no secret that Davis is the preferred opponent of the Republican Party. This may be because he will be the most easily defeated Democrat, or because he is the most Republican of the Democratic candidates.
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