Joe Klein: Alabama's Artur Davis part of "the next generation of black leaders"

From Klein's latest column in Time:

Congressman Charles Rangel of New York, a reasonable man who sometimes goes off the deep end, indulged himself last week. "George Bush is our Bull Connor," he told the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference, referring to the legendary Birmingham, Ala., police chief who attacked peaceful civil rights marchers with dogs and water cannons in 1963. A few minutes earlier, the entertainer Harry Belafonte had read the riot act to Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

He said Clinton's proposed commission to investigate the slow governmental response to Hurricane Katrina was "unnecessary" because "we know what caused it"—a veiled reference to white racism and Republican neglect. He said the African Americans in prison were "victims of poverty" and so were the African-American single mothers of children born out of wedlock. And then, just for fun, he added that blacks need to investigate the "ravages of the Democratic Party and see if there's anything worth salvaging." ...

People like Rangel and Belafonte might do well to listen more closely to the next generation of black leaders—people like Obama and Congressmen Harold Ford of Tennessee, Artur Davis of Alabama and Sanford Bishop of Georgia—who emphasize both the need for more money to fight poverty and the need to change the behavior patterns of the poor. "Our priority has to be with whatever works, as opposed to the conventional wisdom within our group or our party," Obama said last week, adding that liberal and conservative solutions to poverty are not mutually exclusive. "It's not either/or. It's both/and."

Davis also appeared on C-Span's Q&A with Bryan Lamb Sunday. Here's the transcript of that interview.