If the state of Alabama doesn't watch out, it might just end up with a governor entirely too much like Barack Obama.

Artur Davis, Alabama's 41-year-old congressman from the 7th District (which, evocatively, includes Selma), declared his candidacy last February.  In several respects, he seems cut from the same cloth as his old pal the president. 

He is a black Democrat.  He is a smart, a smooth talker, low-key and conciliatory.  He is in his forties now – young, but not too young.  (JFK-young.)

He is a Harvard Law grad; in fact, that is where he and Obama met.  He portrays himself as a centrist, which, in the current Democratic Party formulation, means making vague references to "faith" and vague legislative gestures on behalf of the traditional family while reducing religious devotion to going to church and using government in various ways to, as the liberals say, level the playing field for those doing not so well in the game of life.

One way in which Davis differs from Obama, though, is worthy of note.  Davis married, for the first time, only a month or so before he announced his run for governor.  Given the relative timing of the two events, one could not be blamed for raising an eyebrow.  Might the new family man be something less than a full-tilt heterosexual?

(This might be an echo of Republican governor of Florida Charlie Crist, whose marriage pattern is similar suspect and who has fielded questions about an undeclared gay life.)

A related fact gives pause.  Like Obama, Davis grew up without a father.  But Obama had masculine influences in the form of his maternal grandfather and also, for a time, his mother's second husband.  What father figures Davis had, a routine search of the Web doesn't reveal.  Obama was a husband by age 34 and a father by 37.  Late-ish, but still within the range of the normal.  Davis … Well, one wonders.

It matters for two reasons.  One, if Davis's psychosexual condition is what I suspect, Alabama, and the Democratic Party, may be in for the Second Coming of Jim McGreevey.  McGreevey, the reader will recall, was the New Jersey governor who had had not one but two marriages, with a child each, before deciding that he was, in his heart of hearts, "a gay American."  Now, what plays well in New Jersey for a white liberal Catholic (though McGreevey's political prospects and ambitions have been a mystery of late) may not for a black Baptist in Alabama at this point in history. And so the "down-low" makes political sense for Davis – except for the way it sets him up to fall, or, at least, to create a great deal of awkwardness for himself and those who have placed their trust in him.

And, two, centrist window-dressing notwithstanding, Davis, like Obama, is essentially a Left-liberal.  There is the aforementioned embrace of government-driven "social justice."  Further, though he went on record (after some hesitation) in support of a federal ban on same-sex marriage, he also, later, reintroduced a bill for the Equal Rights Amendment, which is essentially a dictat of radical androgynism.  The two stances clash badly.  But such is realpolitik for a black New Democrat in a Deep-South state.

It is reasonable to suspect, then, that Davis's marriage stance, and his own actual marriage, exist for the sake of political expediency only.  Given both Obama's trend line on gay issues and the insistent nature of homosexual urges in the life of a "straight-married" not-entirely-straight man, Alabamans, were they to elect him governor, could look forward to his views and his lifestyle "evolving."  (Obama, as to the first point, long ago signaled rather loudly an openness to not being held back from endorsing same-sex marriage by his "Christian" commitment.)

In both men, beneath the civil manner is a cynical cast of mind.  Real principle, to this breed, is for suckers.  What is new in the New Democrat is his degree of slickness.  Politics is just a game for getting what you want – for the public good, of course – so what excuse is there for not playing it?  Even Vince Lombardi said that winning is the only thing.

But that way lies moral emptiness.  Artur Davis may fervently wish he were a man, but he is a mouse, a mouse well on the way to becoming a rat.  Alabama should see him for what he is, decline to make him governor, and put him out of the House.