BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Congressman Davis, what‘s the correct way to pronounce your first name?

REP. ARTUR DAVIS (D), ALABAMA: Ar-tur.

LAMB: Where does that come from?

DAVIS: It‘s a romance language. My mother was a French teacher for a long period of time. And Artur is the French or Slavic or Russian, depending on you preference, version of Arthur. So I have heard, as you can imagine, almost every single version of it, from Arturo to Artur to Arthur, and you just learn to endure.

LAMB: What do people call you?

DAVIS: Artur, yes.

LAMB: Your full name?

DAVIS: Exactly, exactly.

LAMB: And your middle name is what?

DAVIS: Now you shouldn‘t have asked about the middle name. My middle name is Genestre, which is French, G-E-N-E-S-T-R-E. I used to use that name when I was in elementary school, but it became impossible for third and fourth graders to pronounce, and teachers had trouble with it also. So Artur is pretty simple, but for some reason it gives people enormous amount of trouble sometimes.

LAMB: Let‘s go over just some of the basics quickly. Second-term congressman.

DAVIS: Yes.

LAMB: Seventh District of Alabama.

DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Harvard Law grad, what year?

DAVIS: 1993.

LAMB: Harvard undergrad, what year?

DAVIS: 1990.

LAMB: And what subject did you study at Harvard?

DAVIS: Well, we called it government. I think most people call it political science. But…

LAMB: Born in what city?

DAVIS: Montgomery, Alabama.

LAMB: And grew up where?

DAVIS: Grew up in Montgomery. I lived in Montgomery until I went off to Harvard to go to college and law school. I came back after that and I‘ve lived now in the Birmingham area in Alabama for about seven years. But Montgomery is the city where I grew up and where my mother still lives.

LAMB: Did you pick Birmingham to live in because you wanted to run in that Seventh District?

DAVIS: No I didn‘t. You know, a lot of people assume that. I was a federal prosecutor for several years. And in the back of my mind I had an interest in running for office, but you know, when you‘re 25, you‘re old kid, you‘re not sure how, when, or where. Hopefully you‘ve the why part of it right, but the how, when, and where part are a little bit difficult.

I was doing well as a prosecutor, but as some point, especially when you‘re 29 or 30, you want to see if the grass is greener on the other side. And frankly Birmingham law firms were paying about $20,000 more than Montgomery law firms were paying, and they had these things I had never heard of called signing bonuses.

So I went off into the world of private practice, and frankly it was one of the least interesting things I‘ve done since I was in the eighth grade. So I decided to get involved in politics. But Birmingham is the biggest city in our state and if you live in one of the other mid-sized cities, like Montgomery, you‘re aware of Birmingham, you think about Birmingham, it‘s the city in Alabama that‘s kind of most like a bigger city. And that was attractive to me at that time.

LAMB: The first time you ran what was – what year that you lost, and who was it to?

DAVIS: Ran in 2000, ran in the primary against my predecessor, Congressman Earl Hilliard. We ran hard. We ran a good campaign. And we got about as much as you can get on $71,000 and a lot of energy and enthusiasm. We got about 34 percent of the vote. Congressman Hilliard got about 58 percent.

We frankly never stopped campaigning. We stayed out there and had another two years to go, and honestly, just stayed out there, found ways to stay visible, found ways to strengthen our message and our platform. And we had a huge turnaround.

In fact, I think, Brian, to this day, the turnaround that we had which was losing by 24 points the first time, and winning by 12 points the next time, that 36-point swing is the biggest swing in a federal race between the same two candidates since World War II.

LAMB: Why did you want to beat an incumbent in your own party?

DAVIS: Well, I didn‘t think the job was being done as well as it needed to be done. I‘ll tell you a little bit about the Seventh District and put that in perspective. We have a big urban area in Birmingham. We have a rural area that we call the Black Belt.

And the rural area is very, very poor. In fact, five of the poorest counties in the United States are located in Alabama, and three of them are in my district. And I just didn‘t think that the job was getting done for the benefit of the people who lived there.

Congressman Hilliard and I agreed on a lot of issues, a few we disagreed on. But being in Congress, in my mind, is never just about the votes you cast, it‘s not just about positions you take. It‘s about how aggressive you are. It‘s about how proactive you are and whether or not you‘re entrepreneurial enough to seek out opportunities and to take advantage of them for the benefit of your district.

And on all of those fronts I felt my predecessor was falling short. So I made a very difficult decision with no political experience, no political money, no large network of friends or family to help me. I just decided to get out there and run.

LAMB: What were you like in high school?

DAVIS: Oh, I was probably what people think of as being a very scholarly kid, not very socially active. I didn‘t really enjoy high school a whole lot. I was one of these kids who sat around and wanted to make sure I kept 100 average in history, that I had straight A‘s all the time.

But honestly, it was probably not the most exciting time of my life. My mother was a school teacher, and I had the interesting fortune of her being a teacher at my high school. So that makes for good discipline if nothing else. But that was a period of time when studying was very important to me.

And I don‘t think I had a clue I would run for office at that time. I used to want to do what you do. I used to want to be in television news. And frankly, I wasn‘t good-looking enough for TV news.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVIS: Then I switched to wanting to be a newspaper reporter or political reporter. And in fact as late as, honestly, my sophomore year in college, that was my plan, to be a political reporter.

One problem, got to my sophomore year, realized that I hadn‘t caught The Harvard Crimson, hadn‘t done any of the major journals on campus, and it occurred to me and people I talked to that I had done nothing to build a resume to be a political reporter. So I started looking at other things.

LAMB: Your father, what did he do?

DAVIS: My parents got divorced when I was about two-and-a-half. He was a male nurse, sometimes I tell people my mother was a teacher and my father a nurse, they think I‘ve got it backwards. But there are a lot of male nurses in this country. My father was one of them. And he did that for a number of years.

But my parents got divorced when I was two-and-a-half. So my mother and grandmother raised me in Alabama. Saw my father a few weeks ago, actually. We see each other about once or twice a year and I‘ve certainly proud of everything that he has done. But my mother and grandmother had the difficult task of raising a son.

LAMB: Were there other children?

DAVIS: No, only child.

LAMB: What impact do you think that had on your life?

DAVIS: Well, you know, I didn‘t think it had a lot of impact until I was 18 and realized my mother could barely afford to get me in college. So it would have been really hard if there had been another sibling.

You know, being an only child, I think, is a challenge. And frankly, it is hard for moms to raise boys. It‘s hard for grandmothers and moms to raise boys. I tell people to this day, I don‘t have a clue how to fix a car, don‘t know how to cut grass, and those probably aren‘t the best recommendations, but I did learn a lot during that period of time about things you take for granted.

My mother was a teacher, my grandmother never really formally learned how to read, but she was able to read the Bible. She was able to read major parts of the Bible. And as corny as it sounds, I would collect my news magazines, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News, that kind of thing, and I would bring them back home during breaks when I was in college. And I would sit down with my grandmother. I would show her pictures of these political people and we would talk about politics.

And she sustained me in talking about that. So you develop a very close relationship when it‘s just a small unit, three people, me, my mother, and grandmother. And I think in a way it kind of gave me the space to get interested in politics and history, because frankly I didn‘t have a lot of distractions.

LAMB: I‘ve seen reference in a couple of things, speeches and all that you‘ve made that you liveed close to the railroad tracks…

DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: … in Montgomery, Alabama.

DAVIS: Yes, literally.

LAMB: What does that mean? Tell us the environment.

DAVIS: Literally. I was born in West Montgomery. People who know the state may have heard of Maxwell Air Force Base, which is to this day one of the major training centers for top Air Force officers. I was born about five minutes from there. And literally there is a railroad track right next to the house I was born in.

Now I sometimes point out to people the house is no longer there, the house was torn down back in the ‘80s, fell in, became dilapidated, the city tore it down. But there is literally a railroad track right next to it. And every now and then someone will introduce me and say I was born on the wrong side of the track.

In that neighborhood, both sides of the track were wrong. But that‘s literally where I was born. That‘s where I grew up, spent about the first – well, the first five or six years, and I moved to another neighborhood that wasn‘t so far away. But it‘s – yes, I‘m one of the few politicians who can literally say they were born next to the railroad tracks.

LAMB: What‘s your mother‘s name?

DAVIS: Arthur Mae (ph). Southerners understand that. People who are not from the South don‘t.

LAMB: Arthur Mae?

DAVIS: May, that‘s right.

LAMB: Two names?

DAVIS: Well, it‘s a combination. You know, we Southerners have an interesting thing that we‘ll often combine names. We‘ll have a male-sounding name and a female name. So you‘ll have Johnny Maes and Arthur Maes and that kind of thing.

LAMB: Where did she get her name?

DAVIS: You know, I‘m not really sure. I think though her father‘s name was Arthur, my grandfather, her father‘s name was Arthur. And rather than try to do some female version of that, I think that my mother, like Arthur Anne (ph), for example, my mother just decided to do the Southern thing and make it Arthur Mae.

LAMB: And what was your grandmother‘s name? Is she still alive, your grandmother?

DAVIS: No, she‘s not alive. Her name was Maddie Friar (ph). She was born in Arkansas and then moved to Banks County, Georgia, and came to Alabama when she was around, oh, 25 or 26, I think, as a very young woman. But she died in 1990 when I was in college.

LAMB: How did it come to pass that your mother was a French teacher? What was her environment when she grew up?

DAVIS: Well, she was one of the first teachers in the newly integrated school system in Montgomery County. She had gone to Alabama State University at a time when that was a very popular school for teachers in our state, African-American teachers in our state.

And then she taught for a while in a little town called Talladega. And she went back to the Montgomery system and got hired there in 1964 and was one of the very first blacks to be hired to teach in that system.

The reality is that blacks who had been in the system had been in the segregated schools, when the system became dual, very few blacks were in the system. So she went to teach at a high school called Jefferson Davis High School, which is where I ended up graduating and was one of the first two black teachers there. And not quite sure how she ended up in French.

She liked languages and she spent a lot of time, you know, getting prepared to do that while she was in college. At one point she had the goal of being a United Nations interpreter. And for some reason that sounded exciting and exotic for here, so she figured she would learn languages.

And this happened with a lot of women in that era. Their opportunities just simply weren‘t anywhere near what people have today. So they had dreams, but they often ended up going back in and working in the community. And teaching was, as now, an enormously honorable profession, that‘s what a lot of young African-American women are doing.

LAMB: When did you have a goal of going to Harvard?

DAVIS: I decided to go to Harvard – or I first thought about going to Harvard about one week before the application was due. I was interested in going to Princeton. Princeton was kind of the place that people in Montgomery, Alabama, went if they wanted to go to an Ivy. There is an active Princeton network there.

And I remember reading about Harvard, of course, knew about it, and was close to the 350th anniversary. I also happened to be a big fan of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. So Harvard had a certain romance to me because of all of that.

And about a week before the application deadline, which was December 15th, 1986, I got some mail from Harvard. Never thought about going there. Thought it was outside my reach, frankly, didn‘t think I could afford it, didn‘t think I was smart enough to go there.

Decided on a whim to just go ahead and apply. And didn‘t expect to get in and was looking at other schools, planning to go to Princeton. As soon as the Harvard file came, and, Brian, if you have kids or grandkids, but you know when you get the big file it‘s good news, the little file is bad news.

Because the big one means all the stuff that comes with room and board and all the things that will relate to your attending the school. So when we got the big file in April from Harvard, I think it took me about 10 minutes to decide that‘s where I wanted to go.

LAMB: Did you – what were you sitting there with when you applied to Harvard, your SATs and your grades from Montgomery? And by the way, Jefferson Davis, did you know what – when you were in Jefferson Davis, did you know what that symbolism was all about?

DAVIS: Oh, I sure did. In fact, I‘ll you a story. When I was 10 years old, Easter Sunday weekend, the Saturday before Easter Sunday, my mother took me on a tour of some of the historical sites in Montgomery, Alabama.

We went to the state capital. We went to the Department of Archives and History. And the last stop that we made was the first White House of the Confederacy where Jefferson Davis lived. I remember it to this day.

First of all, I think we were probably the first two black people to ever visit there.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVIS: And I remember we – everyone there was so wonderful to us. And the curator of the museum stopped what she was doing and took the time to take us on the tour. I think to this day she thought we were probably FBI testers or something trying to see what would happen when we went in.

So that‘s the first time I heard about Jefferson Davis. But I absolutely knew the history. If you live in the South, you understand that, that‘s just a part of South. There‘s a duality in the South.

Montgomery, my home town, is referred to as the cradle of the Confederacy because it was the first Confederate capital. It also happens to be the cradle of the civil rights movement. And those histories are dual.

January 15th every year there is a state holiday for Martin Luther King‘s birthday and for Robert E. Lee‘s birthday. And I remember when Doug Wilder got elected governor of Virginia, a lot of people said to him, why don‘t you take down these statues of all these Confederate leaders?

And I think he did the right thing. He said, look, I‘m governor of this whole state. I represent a long line of history. And these images and these symbols are a part of that long line of history.

I‘m not big fan of Confederate flags, but Jefferson Davis High School, Robert E. Lee High School, that‘s a part of the history in our state and I respect that.

LAMB: I‘ll come back to the Harvard thing. But I remember reading also in a speech you talked about one of your most interesting moments was watching Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia, a Republican, accept the fact that he had won election and behind him was the Confederate flag. What was your – why was that a moment that you remember in your political history?

DAVIS: I remember that and I remember what he said. I remember Sonny Perdue, as people from Georgia know, was the first Republican ever elected governor in that state. Georgia, while it had been voting Republican for president, now elected a governor who was a Republican.

And Sonny Perdue was like most candidates, was ecstatic that night. I remember something he said. He said that tonight as the first Republican elected governor, I feel like saying we too have overcome, or we shall overcome, something like that.

And there was something about that that was just very jarring to me, with the Confederate flag waving behind him. People use Dr. King‘s rhetoric a lot. And people often misuse his rhetoric. I don‘t know that it had ever been used by someone who had run for office and had campaigned in part on reviving the Confederate flag.

So I don‘t know Sonny Perdue, I‘ve never met him, and the people of Georgia, I‘m sure, will make their decisions about him, but there was something jarring about that moment to me.

And it does speak to history. We have to respect the dual traditions that exist in the South, but nor should we misuse those traditions, nor should we collapse them and create something that‘s not real.

LAMB: Well, let me ask you this. You lived in Birmingham, you lived in Montgomery, how different is it, in your head when you‘re there, versus what it was like when you were at Harvard when it comes to this race issue? Do you feel differently about those two different locations?

DAVIS: You know, when I was at Harvard, people often asked me, what is it like being in Montgomery? What is it like being from Montgomery? What‘s your state like?

And I told people then, I will tell people now, Alabama is not fundamentally different from the rest of the country. Sure, we have a history and we‘re not proud of all aspects of that history. But then again, our country has a history.

Boston has a history. And I still remember, as I think all young black men do, what it‘s like being in a city like Boston sometimes. This is a part of our trying to work out together as a country whether we can respect each other, whether we can embrace and be strengthened by our differences instead being alienated or threatened by them.

But I don‘t think Alabama is that different. People ask me is Alabama somehow further behind on questions of race? And sure, they will point to what I‘m sure you remember, the vote on the amendment last year to our constitution that would have removed segregationist language.

People will say, well, your state won‘t even vote to remove segregationist language. You know, how can you be optimistic about that?

And I‘ll point out to people, first of all, the amendment got confused in all kinds of issues about taxes. And there was a lot of distortion around the amendment. People didn‘t know what they were voting for.

But the larger proposition, I think about the progress we have made. My being in office and representing a racially mixed district, our drawing support from a number of people who didn‘t vote for a Democrat but me last year, the changes I see day-in and day-out.

Mobile, Alabama, just elected its first black mayor, a guy named Sam Jones. Sam Jones got 40 percent of the white vote in some of the big white precincts in Mobile, and won easily. Everybody expected a racially polarized election and instead what they got was a good, solid win by a very strong black candidate.

In fact, by the time this runs, it will be within a day of Sam Jones‘ inauguration. And I look forward to being down there at that event. Alabama is making all kinds of strides. Sure, we‘ve got our divisive forces in the state, but there are so many more forces that are cohesive and that bring us together.

LAMB: We should point out that I think it was a Harvard student that asked you a question that everybody quotes, that you‘re interested in going beyond Congress – or the House, and either run for the Senate and the governorship, what, by 2009?

DAVIS: Well, we‘ve got a couple of reelections to win between now and then, beginning in ‘06. But I was at Harvard several months ago, as you pointed out. And a student there asked me if I had ever thought of running for higher office. And I have this habit that is distressing to my staff of answering the questions that I‘m asked.

And I told him that at some point I may very look at doing that. And it‘s interesting that got picked up by our local newspaper. It was buried on like page 58A or something like that. Another paper picked it up. The AP picked it up. TV stations had some fun with it and decided to tease it on the newscast.

So all of a sudden we had all these stories about whether I would run for governor or senator. What I‘ve said is that in 2010, which is what I would expect would be the most remotely conceivable opportunity that would happen I think would be before that, that I would look at running. But that‘s not my focus today.

And I would often tell people the best politics is doing a very good job at the position that you‘re in.

LAMB: Thirty-seven years old?

DAVIS: Yes, 38 in a few weeks.

LAMB: John F. Kennedy, one of your heroes, was 43 when he got to be president. Bobby Kennedy was younger than that when he was attorney general and ran for president.

Do you think of yourself as someone who could in this country go the whole route someday?

DAVIS: Oh, I don‘t even focus on that. I mean, I expect my friend from Illinois, Senator Obama, to run for president in the next eight years and I look forward to seeing that.

I do think that we will reach a point in our country where exclusive issues today, like gender and race will come off the table. I think that Senator Clinton in 2008 may or may not win, but it won‘t be because she‘s a woman. She won‘t win because she‘s a woman, she won‘t lose because she‘s a woman.

I think that when Senator Obama‘s opportunity comes, it will be more of a test for the country, but I think in the next 15 to 20 to 25 years, you will see an African-American president.

And one of the great things about American politics is that it is impossible to project the future. If someone had said in 1940 who was going to be president in 1960, I don‘t think that a college senior named Jack Kennedy would have been on the radar screen.

If someone had said in 1960 who was going to be president in 1980, I don‘t think that a failed actor who was hosting "Death Valley Days" named Ronald Reagan would have been on the radar screen.

And finally, if someone had said in 1980, who‘s going to be elected in 2000, I don‘t think that the son of the vice presidential candidate would have been high on the radar screen.

So there are so many imponderables in American. And I just want to do as honorable a job as I can serving the people in my district. And we‘ll see what happens.

LAMB: I want to get back to the Harvard thing and how you got in. But I want to ask this question. You have Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Selma?

DAVIS: Yes.

LAMB: Edmund Pettis Bridge?

DAVIS: Yes.

LAMB: But you also have two counties, now I wrote this down. And is it possible that in the counties of Perry and Wilcox in your district, the Seventh District of Alabama, that they spend as little as $419 a year per students?

DAVIS: On students. That‘s right. That‘s the county match in those areas.

LAMB: Well, to reflect that, I think here in Washington it‘s like $15,000 a year.

DAVIS: That‘s right. That‘s right. Well, you have…

LAMB: How is that possible?

DAVIS: It‘s a complicated statistic. And it shouldn‘t be, but it has become complicated. The reality is that, as most people in the audience know, schools are financed through three different sources: the federal government provides some money, primarily Title I money; some of the money that comes in through various other federal vehicles like school lunches or programs or special ed; the states provide a big chunk of money that often goes to things like teacher salaries, administration; and then your local schools provide a match; and most areas, as in Alabama, the local schools have a large responsibility.

But the ability of those local schools to meet that responsibility is a function of how much property tax revenue they‘re collecting. And in most states in this country, it‘s local property taxes that finance schools at the local level.

So if you have a very poor county that doesn‘t have a lot of high-end residential or commercial value, well, clearly, you won‘t have a big tax base. So Perry and Wilcox are examples of a trend that we see in other parts of Alabama and in this country.

They‘re only able to put respectively $419 and $468 per people on the table. Now the state puts some on the table, so if you were to do an aggregate number of the amount spent per pupil, it comes up to around $1,800, but you made an important point.

In Washington, D.C., it‘s around $15,000. In New Jersey it‘s around $17,000. California it‘s around $21,000. So I make the point that money does not solve the educational problem, but you try to solve it with the complete absence of money, you try to solve it with poverty, and that‘s exactly what‘s going on in west Alabama.

A lot of the school districts – or a lot of the counties in my district simply are not able to finance their basic needs at the local level. And even when you put in your state money, it leaves them woefully short of what other communities are getting.

LAMB: Go back to Jefferson Davis High School in Montgomery, Alabama, which is not in your district now, what kind of money did they spend per student when you were in school, do you have any idea?

DAVIS: I don‘t. Montgomery is a relatively well-financed system. And that, you know, makes the point that money by itself is not decisive. It‘s a changed school system though. The biggest change in Montgomery is that when I was there the school systems were very well integrated.

Jeff Davis High School was about 60-40, 60 white, 40 black. And at that time, that was the racial balance in Montgomery. Today, well, Montgomery is around 52 white and 48 black. Jeff Davis is around 75 percent, maybe approaching 80 percent…

LAMB: Black or white?

DAVIS: Black. And what has happened is that a lot of white parents have left the school system. They‘ve got to private schools. They‘ve put their kids in magnet schools. Or they‘ve altogether moved out of the county to find a different educational system.

It‘s one of the real challenges that we have today, 51 years after Brown versus Board, we have had a gradual but continuing re-segregation of public schools. And the trend is worse in the South.

LAMB: Back to the Harvard thing for a moment. You graduated cum laude in one of the schools, and magna cum laude in another one. Which was which?

DAVIS: I was magna cum laude undergrad and cum laude in law school. That‘s right.

LAMB: OK. How did you get in? How were your – what were your SATs, or – you don‘t have to give us that exactly, and your grades when you were teeing up to go into Harvard?

DAVIS: Yes. My grades were pretty good. I think I had a GPA of around 3.9 or something like that. I had a B in driver‘s ed, I do recall that.

(LAUGHTER)

LAMB: That‘s 3.9 out of 4, isn‘t it?

DAVIS: And I had good SAT scores, not spectacular SATs. I had, I think, lower 700s in the verbal and lower 600s in the math. I suspect I got in the way a lot of kids get in. Harvard was very concerned about having diversity in its class.

Harvard was very concerned about having a student body that reflected the different ethnic strands in our country. And I have no doubt that that was a major factor in my getting in because my SAT scores were lower than a lot of the Caucasian kids who applied.

Similarly for Harvard Law School, my LSAT scores were respectable, but they were lower than those of a lot of the Caucasian students. And one of the things that I point out about what we call affirmative action or using race as a positive factor, it is still important in our society because I did well at those schools, but I wouldn‘t have gotten in without what we call affirmative action.

I was best oralist, as a matter of fact, at Harvard Law School, won the award as being the best oral advocate there. But if I had been judged simply based on my test scores, I would never have been there to win that honor.

Graduated Harvard undergrad magna cum laude, if I had been judged just based on my test scores, I wouldn‘t have been there to do that. So the reality is that these tests and the various factors that we use to measure students don‘t tell you a lot about how kids are going to perform once they get there.

LAMB: Tests in law school are – there is no name on them, or at least there didn‘t used to be.

DAVIS: That‘s right. That‘s right.

LAMB: Is it the blue book they used at…

(CROSSTALK)

DAVIS: That‘s right.

LAMB: So you would take the test and no one would know who you – I mean, the grader wouldn‘t know who you were?

DAVIS: Right. That‘s right. I mean, obviously, you get matched up for purposes of having your grade reported to you, but I think that‘s right.

Now today, of course, I don‘t think they have blue books. I think today you‘ve got everything on computer. And it‘s an amazing change, when I was there you had to do the blue books and fill everything out by hand. Now I think you have to turn in a computer disk or something like that. So it‘s a totally different world.

LAMB: Let‘s put you in Perry County or Wilcox County growing up. Would you have stood a chance to go where you‘ve gone? And what do you think over your early years, grade school, high school, prepared you, got you interested, you know, besides your mother?

DAVIS: I would have had a chance but it would have been a lot harder, because if I had grown up in a Perry County or a Wilcox County, there is a strong likelihood that my parents wouldn‘t have been making a lot of money. There‘s a very strong likelihood that there wouldn‘t have been a lot of real job opportunities for them.

If I had grown up in a Perry or Wilcox, I would have had school systems that were struggling with just basic infrastructure, like having the right textbooks and having doors to the bathroom stalls.

And those kinds of things make a difference. If you educate kids in an environment where they see failure, they will begin to internalize that. And it‘s an enormous challenge, getting kids to feel good about themselves.

And when you put people behind the eight-ball, when you put them in underfunded, impoverished environments, it does challenge them. Sure, there will be kids who make it out, that happens every day. But how many kids and how abundant is the chance for those kids to make it out?

LAMB: How did get interested though in high school in going to a place like Harvard or even Princeton? Can you remember when somebody first told you what those places were?

DAVIS: You know, I don‘t. But I suspect that it had a lot to do with my mother. She was very good, and is very good today, for that matter, at pushing me to do things before I sometimes think I can do them.

It wouldn‘t have occurred to me when I was 12 or 13 to think about leaving home, much less going away to a school like Harvard. But she was very big on pushing boundaries, on talking to me about the importance of pushing boundaries. And I think that paid off.

And the point that I often make, often the most important definition of the horizons of a child are your parents. So I would say to parents, if you want your kids to dream, you have got to dream with them. You have got to get on the box and dream with them and help to shape their aspirations.

LAMB: What would she do, though, for you directly, I mean? How did – you know, on a day-to-day basis?

DAVIS: Yes. She did a lot of little things. I remember $10 today is nothing for a book. You can get $10 a day for a book that has been around for like 10 years. Back in 1976, that was a lot of money for a book.

She would take me on the first, which was payday, to the bookstore, the downtown Capital News Store in Montgomery, Alabama, and I would get to buy any book that I wanted. And she would pray and hope that it was not more than $10.

So that‘s what started me out on reading. I mentioned early on in this interview that she took me to visit the capital and the first White House of the Confederacy, this is what was important about that.

It introduced me to history, and that weekend I started keeping a notebook of famous people. And when I would hear the name of a famous person, I would write them down in notebook. And I finally got up to around 1,000 names before I lost the notebook.

LAMB: You lost the notebook?

DAVIS: I lost the notebook. I wish I had kept it, so I would try and get some money for it one day. But she really did the little things to just open up my horizons. And that‘s important, Brian, because when you‘re 9 and 10, kids are not naturally interested in history. And if you get interested in that kind of thing, frankly, your peers will not sustain you. They will think you‘re being a nerd. So it‘s up to your parents to say, you know what, what you‘re doing is good and it‘s important. And she did that.

LAMB: Well, back to this notebook, what year was it that you started the notebook?

DAVIS: 1977. The Saturday before Easter Sunday.

LAMB: How old were you?

DAVIS: I was 9 going on 10.

LAMB: And what kind of names would you put in there?

DAVIS: The very first name was Ethan Allen for some reason. And that was because there was a furniture store in Montgomery named after Ethan Allen who I learned was also a Revolutionary War hero.

And there was no rhythm to it. But I ended up – all the presidents ended up being in there, and all kinds of people. But that was what fascinated me about history then and now, that it is nothing other than a collection of the lives of people, some of them great, some of them ordinary. But history is nothing other than a collection of what people have done in challenging circumstances and how they have risen to those circumstances.

LAMB: How often would you carry the notebook with you? Or did you keep it at home?

DAVIS: I kept it at home. If we took a trip or something, I would take it with me. But once you get interested and you open up your mind and your ears, you‘ll hear about famous people or people doing great things every day. So I think almost every few days I would make an entry in it.

LAMB: Did you just write the name of the person in that?

DAVIS: That‘s right, write the name down, write the name down.

LAMB: Did you ever go look up a book on them or anything like that?

DAVIS: I would. I would. I was a voracious reader. And it was nothing for me to read 30 and 35 books a summer. And I guess one of the big things I miss about not being a child, getting to read all the time. But I love to read about history, love to read about the people who shaped our country.

LAMB: Where did you get that, the reading thing? Does your mom read?

DAVIS: She did. And my grandmother, even though she never formally learned to read, she was able to make her way through the Bible and she was able to peck her way through a newspaper.

And they really liked that kind of thing. They really like learning, so I was fortunate. I grew up in a home that wasn‘t materially rich, single parent, grandmother living in the house. We had every financial strain you can imagine.

But the reality is that I never focused on any of that, I never focused on the financial strains because I was in this world of history and books and great things happening.

LAMB: Did you watch television?

DAVIS: I did. I did. I vividly remember "My Three Sons," and "Leave It to Beaver," and "The Brady Bunch." And I used to fantasize about being the seventh Brady. You know, so it‘s – I watched television a lot. And I think as a child it was a kind of escape for me. History was one kind of escape, and I think television was another kind of escape.

LAMB: What at Harvard made an impression on you?

DAVIS: Just the incredible variety. And I don‘t just mean that in the obvious sense of different races, I mean different nationalities, I mean different religions, I mean different philosophies, different levels of talent. It‘s the great thing about a place like Harvard, you have all of these different strands come together and it works.

Now everybody doesn‘t like everybody, everybody doesn‘t know everybody, but it works and you get a cohesive environment. And you get an environment where difference is a good thing.

LAMB: Can you pick somebody that you remember making a significant impression on you at Harvard?

DAVIS: A lot of my teachers made a real impression. Richard Neustadt was the author of the book "Presidential Power," and I still remember to this day how excited I was when he invited freshman students in his class to come over just to sit around and to talk politics with him one Sunday night.

And I remember how nervous I was going over there and I was sitting there nervously wanting to ask a question, wanting to ask it just right. And I remember asking him about Bobby Kennedy and whether he thought Bobby Kennedy would have been elected.

Just being there with this guy who was a remarkably elegant writer, and who was a remarkably cogent and articulate teacher, and seemed legendary when he was standing at the front of the room, his last class at Harvard was the class that I had.

And to this day that was one of my great thrills academically, getting to sit and listen to this guy just talk about politics for two hours with a bunch of freshman.

LAMB: You graduated, again, what year from law school?

DAVIS: Ninety-three from law school.

LAMB: What did you do right away?

DAVIS: I was a law clerk for a federal judge, Judge Myron Thompson, whose 25th anniversary on the bench we will celebrate on October the 8th, and I will be honored to be the MC actually at his program.

But that was my first job. He was the second African-American appointed to the bench in Alabama – the federal bench.

LAMB: After your clerkship what did you do?

DAVIS: I was an assistant U.S. attorney. I was a federal prosecutor in Montgomery and did that for four years. Did a range of cases, when you‘re in a small office you do a little bit of everything. But my specialty was probably narcotics cases.

LAMB: How long did you do that?

DAVIS: About four-and-half-years.

LAMB: Your race that you won – and you won again by how many percentage points?

DAVIS: Well, the first race I won against Congressman Hilliard, I won a run-off by 12 points after losing by 24 points just two years earlier.

LAMB: It was very controversial from this aspect. He was a big backer of Arab causes and the Jewish community came in and supported you.

DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Big time. How much money, of all the money you had to raise, came from the Jewish community?

DAVIS: We raised a significant sum from Jewish individuals around the country. Congressman Hilliard had really gone beyond, I think, advocating Arab causes to, in some ways, taking positions that were downright offensive to the Jewish community.

He was one of only four members of Congress who didn‘t vote for a resolution condemning the Intifada and condemning terrorist attacks against Israel. Only four people wouldn‘t vote for this resolution and that kind of thing is offensive to people. It seems like you‘re going out of your way to make a statement.

And we made a decision to reach out to this community. And we were very, very pleased by what we saw. Now the race back home, frankly, was not about Middle East issues in any way, shape or form. Most people in my district weren‘t remotely interested in those issues. But it did open up a funding base, and that‘s the reality in politics.

You have to do what‘s necessary to assemble a base to win. And I had strong disagreements with my opponent on national issues related to the Middle East. But the issues at home were very local: Who can be effective in fighting for health care? Who can be effective in trying to create a job base in the district? And that‘s how we won and that‘s the grounds that we fought on.

LAMB: Roughly 700,000 people in the district. You‘re in the Seventh District of Alabama. The statistics that I saw say that only 36 percent of your district is white.

DAVIS: That‘s about right.

LAMB: Or to put it the other, it‘s a very large percentage of black people in the district. And you have a lot of the poor counties, as you mentioned. Take your own life and superimpose it over the Perry County people or the Wilcox County people, what do you have to do in those counties so that one of those kids there could go to Harvard?

DAVIS: Well, the first thing you have to do is build strong enough parental structures. I wish it were easy enough that I could start the conversation by saying, let‘s get more money in. I can‘t do that, though. I think you have to have strong parental structures.

LAMB: But you didn‘t.

DAVIS: Well, we did in a sense, though. I did in a sense. I didn‘t have a father, but I had a mother and grandmother who more than made up for that. A strong parental structure is not always the conventional nuclear family. It‘s having a committed parent who believes in the welfare of that child and who brings those values to that child.

LAMB: How do you do that, though, in your district?

DAVIS: Well, you‘ve got to recognize first of all the reasons why sometimes you don‘t have that structure. The biggest reason you don‘t have it is poverty and the grinding effect of poverty.

It is very hard to be a good parent. It‘s very hard to be a responsible parent when you‘re struggling with the necessities in life.

LAMB: How poverty-stricken is your district in those areas?

DAVIS: It is very much so in those areas. In the counties you mention, Wilcox, Perry, what we call the Black Belt, poverty rate is around 40 percent, which is regardless of what the national economy is doing.

Even when unemployment is low, the poverty rates are very high. I guess people are working in low-wage jobs. So you‘ve got to find ways to get in, build a job base that will let parents climb the economic ladder. Work with your at-risk parents, your teenage moms.

One of the counties in my district, Greene County, 60 percent of the children born in 2004 were born to moms between the age of 15 and 17.

LAMB: Go on, say that again.

DAVIS: Sixty percent of the children born in Greene County, born to moms between the ages of 15 and 17.

LAMB: How – were they married?

DAVIS: The majority of them were not married, something like 80 percent were not married, and perhaps even closer to 90 percent were not married. So ultimately you‘ve got to go into communities and arrest these destructive social forces if you‘re going to get the background to produce good students.

LAMB: Why is that happening?

DAVIS: Well, it‘s happening because it‘s a combination of things. When you have school systems that are strapped for resources, when you have an absence of jobs, when you have an absence of a health care structure, all of these things weave together to create a difficult circumstance for young people to make the right choices; and when they make the wrong choices, they get children or they situations where they get criminal records or make mistakes that prevent them from getting the jobs that are available.

So I firmly there is no way to talk about public education without going into communities and figuring out a way to revive families.

LAMB: All right. You are in the Oval Office and you‘ve got all the money you need to deal with Greene County. You don‘t have to ask anybody‘s permission, what would you do, specifically what would you do in Greene County to make it better for those people?

DAVIS: Early child development. You‘ve got to find ways to go in and build structures to help your at-risk parents, your teenage moms, your very poor parents. You‘ve got to find ways to deal with the phase between being born and being 6 years of age.

LAMB: So how do you do that? What specifically would you do?

DAVIS: Focus on nutrition for kids. You get a level of counseling in there for parents. And you make sure that those years between zero and 6 aren‘t lost. That‘s what we‘re missing right now in our rural school systems and a lot of our urban school systems. We‘re not doing enough in the early child development phase.

LAMB: What about the – let‘s say the 15-year-old mother has no interest in really doing any of the things that you want done and they just – and they‘re in an environment where they say, don‘t give me that counseling stuff, you know, I‘ve got this kid. How do you – do you take the kid away from the mother?

DAVIS: Well, here‘s what you do. You work with the churches. You work with the institutions that they trust. You go in. You find institutions that are trusted, whether it‘s teachers, whether it‘s churches, whether it‘s older people in the community, and you work with them and you build networks and you build daycare structures and you build early child structures that will – early child development structures that will reach these people where they are, that will deal with their level of mistrust and begin to meet it and move in a very different direction.

But that has got to be the strategy. These deficits are opening up very early. And then they only worsen over a period of time. So if I had to pick one area of underinvestment, it‘s what we‘re doing with children in those first six years.

Now then, moving beyond that, you‘ve got to focus on health care all through high school and junior high school. You‘ve got kids in my district who have full-blown adult diabetes, sometimes it‘s hereditary, sometimes it‘s bad diet choices, sometimes it‘s the fact that we‘re not diagnosing early diabetes and then it‘s blossoming, becoming full-blown.

So you‘ve got to come in and deal with these health issues that are arising in children because if you have kids who get sick when they are 8, 9, 10 years of age, who contract serious illnesses, they‘re not going to be effective students.

LAMB: What else would you do?

DAVIS: Well, another thing we‘ve got to spend money on is frankly workforce development. That‘s the reality in a lot of my district. People leave school, get a GED, or they leave school at the age of 18, don‘t go to college, don‘t go to military. They‘re in the communities. They have ambitions, no outlets.

They‘re not prepared to do the high-paying jobs that come in to these automobile production facilities that are coming into Alabama.

LAMB: And you‘ve got Mercedes in your district.

DAVIS: Right. Mercedes is in my district. Hyundai is right outside my district. Honda is not far from my district.

LAMB: Do people in the district get the jobs or do the people who come from outside your district get the jobs?

DAVIS: Well, the reality is not enough people in my district have gotten the jobs because they haven‘t been trained to do them. They haven‘t been given the level of skills that they need to do them. So again on the back-end, when people leave school and when they don‘t go through the military or four-year or two-year structure, you‘ve got to get in and train them to do the work that‘s available.

LAMB: I had a statistic, I don‘t know if I can find it fast enough here, on the high school graduation rate in your district. Do you happen to know it off the top of your head?

DAVIS: Well, it‘s too low. I don‘t remember the exact numbers, but my district is one where I think it may be the lowest in the state. But there is another reality. Even when kids graduate high school, they‘re often not prepared to do anything but take an exit exam.

I‘m amazed when I see kids who can pass an exit exam but who cannot engage in cognitive reasoning or can‘t figure out how to work the levers at a Mercedes or a Hyundai facility. So what we‘re teaching our kids is too geared and too oriented toward tests and not geared enough toward the work that they may be able to do when they come out of school.

LAMB: What I see here is high school is 73 percent graduate from high school and 80 do on a national basis.

DAVIS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

LAMB: And the bachelor‘s degrees, only 15 percent of your constituents have bachelor‘s degrees.

DAVIS: That‘s right.

LAMB: And 24.4 percent on a national basis.

DAVIS: That‘s right. And that contributes to the low-wage climate. But again, even with 80 percent nationally and 73 percent graduating high school, the question is, what are our kids really prepared to do?

Three hundred thirteen schools in my state were labeled "failing" under the No Child Left Behind criteria, 76 of them in my district. And the reality is that how we go about measure whether a school is winning or losing today is way too complex, focuses on too many non-academic factors like attendance rates.

We label schools failing, don‘t give them any extra help. We put new burdens on schools, don‘t give them any extra money. So we‘ve got to have a radical change in the way that we look at sustaining public education in this country.

LAMB: If you went to one of your counties, would people, say, that come from, let‘s say, your old stomping grounds in Boston or Cambridge, Harvard, the housing is bad, the teachers aren‘t paid enough, the schools are dilapidated, would they say all those things?

DAVIS: They would say that about a lot of my district, absolutely. That‘s right.

LAMB: So how do you – is it humanly possible to flip all that and have better-looking schools and higher-paid teachers and housing that‘s better for those folks down there in any way in the near future?

DAVIS: No, it‘s absolutely doable if we will make the kind of commitment that we‘ve made to other projects in this country. This is the reality. We‘ve had to see the devastation from Hurricane Katrina to be reminded that there is a large underclass in this country.

Our FEMA director – former FEMA director, Mr. Brown, famously said that the problem with the Superdome what that there were all these people that we didn‘t even know existed.

Well, people who represent districts like mine know that there are people that the administration frankly sometimes does not know exists.

LAMB: You‘ve been in Congress now not even three years.

DAVIS: That‘s right, three-and-a-half, that‘s right.

LAMB: What surprises you about the job itself and your ability to get things done?

DAVIS: The biggest negative surprise is how partisan Washington, D.C., has become. And understand, I have no problem with principled disagreements about issues. I have no problem with people in my party criticizing the administration or the administration criticizing people in my party.

What frustrates me is that we are often not arguing about the substance of ideas, we‘re arguing about personalities or we‘re arguing about things that are labeled "values" that don‘t tell you a whole lot about how we treat people.

It‘s very hard getting anything done in Washington. You‘ll have a good idea but what you find out is that it may not be in your party‘s interest to push that idea, or in the other party‘s interest to accept it.

LAMB: So what‘s the better job? Running for United States Senate or running for governor of the state of Alabama?

DAVIS: Well, you have a great opportunity if you‘re in an executive position. You have a greater opportunity if you‘re one of 100 as opposed to one of 435.

LAMB: Only 26 percent of the state of Alabama is African-American.

DAVIS: That‘s right.

LAMB: What are your chances? If you ran for governor or ran for Senate or statewide, will race play that significant a role?

DAVIS: Well, if I were to run that kind of race four years from now or at some point in the future, there are some Alabamians who would vote based on race on both sides, black and white. But I firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of people in my state would vote based on what kind of vision I offered them or what kind of values I talked about in my campaign.

I‘m a big believer that the black voters and white voters in my state have very similar conditions and aspirations and values for their children. And if you find a way to talk to them about that kind of commonality, they will respond to you.

You can‘t run by saying, let‘s make history. Most people are not interested in that. You can‘t run by saying, you know, let‘s have the first in the country, the only in the country. Most voters don‘t care about that.

They do care about whether or not you can make a difference in their lives. So if I were to ever run for governor or senator, it would be with the premise that the policies that I advocated would make a difference in their lives.

LAMB: You‘re on the Budget Committee, Financial Services Committee, and as we talked through this process you kept mentioning the Black Belt, does that mean what looks like, the black part of the country?

DAVIS: Well, it‘s a part of Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi. Mississippi‘s part of it is called the Delta. And it‘s a number of counties that are very poor. Many of them are predominantly black. The title comes from the soil, not from race, it comes from the soil.

LAMB: When was it established as the Black Belt?

DAVIS: Probably that title came into vogue around the 1860s or 1850s. But the reality is that now these are areas that do happen to be predominantly African-American; but having said that, there are large numbers of poor and low-income whites who live there.

And really the term in Alabama is a synonym for these very poor, very distressed counties. They have a lot of black and white people whose communities are economically underperforming.

LAMB: You mentioned Barack Obama earlier. You said he would probably be president some day or something to that effect. Do you really think he will be?

DAVIS: I think a lot of Barack. We were at Harvard Law School together. I think he has an enormous amount of talent. I wish him the best in his career. And I hope that he will run for the presidency. I don‘t think he‘ll do it in 2008, that will be too soon.

But I hope that he will run for president as early as 2012. I hope that he will be given serious consideration to be on the ticket, not because he‘s black but because he is exceptionally talented and he knows the issues and would be a wonderful candidate.

Whether the country is ready to absorb his candidacy will depend on all kinds of factors. But I think it would have been good for America if Colin Powell had run in ‘96. It will be good for America if Senator Obama runs for the presidency, because what it will do is it will make Americans have to expand their thinking.

It will make them have to look at the possibility of voting for someone from a class that previously has been excluded. And I would say the same thing about gender. I hope that Senator Clinton runs. Whether or not I support her, whether or not she wins, I would like to see her run so that the country has to seriously contemplate the possibility of a woman being president in some venue other than a television series.

LAMB: You did, though, intimate earlier that you think she is going to be the candidate, I think.

DAVIS: Well, that‘s going to run. I wouldn‘t even begin to make a prediction on who our nominee will be. But I think that she will run.

LAMB: What will it take for a Democrat to be president of the United States again?

DAVIS: Well, to be president of the United States, we‘ve got to do two things. Our party has got to be able to talk about national security in a credible way. Senator Kerry lost in part in 2004 because people thought that while they disagreed with George Bush on a lot of issues, he had a more credible security plan. Democrats have to close that gap.

Second of all, we have got to make our policies clear and relevant to people. And they‘ve got to be positive. It‘s not just enough to say I‘m against everything the Republicans are for. It‘s not enough to say the Republicans are bad people, don‘t understand America.

We have to talk in clear and compelling ways about our vision. We have to talk about how we can change public education. We have to talk about how we can change the whole level of equity around health care.

We‘ve got to talk about those kinds of things. And if we do it in a compelling and clear enough way, people will respond to it.

LAMB: Now when Arthur Mae, your mother, watches this interview, what is she going to tell you afterwards that you should have done better?

DAVIS: Probably sit up straighter.

(LAUGHTER)

LAMB: What about the substance of it, do you ever talk about that?

DAVIS: We do. You know, I‘m sure she probably is watching it and will watch the first repeat of it. I‘ll be giving a speech somewhere I think, but I‘m sure she will catch it. I don‘t know, you know, what I try to do is honestly to do the best I can in talking about the issues and representing people.

And she recognizes that she‘s fortunate. She‘s essentially a single parent, my parents got divorced at an early age, who didn‘t have a lot when she was growing up, and she gets to see her son represent about 670,000 people. And that does make her very proud.

And it should. And it says something about this country, that you can literally be born next to a railroad track in Montgomery and have a chance.

LAMB: Is she still teaching?

DAVIS: No. She retired several years ago.

LAMB: And she lives in Montgomery, Alabama.

DAVIS: That‘s right. That‘s right.

LAMB: We‘re out of time. Thank you, Congressman Artur Davis.

DAVIS: Thank you for having me.

LAMB: Sure, thank you very much.

DAVIS: Thank you.