BUFFALO — Jack Davis, the multimillionaire businessman running here in western New York to unseat one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, makes his fellow Democrats a little nervous.þþMr. Davis is prone to overstatement. He has warned about “Red China,” for example, and suggested he would take a bat to anyone who sent his sons sexually explicit e-mail messages like those a congressman sent to young male pages. þþHe defies liberal orthodoxies. He has said he wants to “seal” the nation’s borders and has held memberships in conservative groups like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. þþAnd he is a bit of a maverick. He has banished his handlers from the room when a reporter interviews him, and he has yet to invite any national party luminary to campaign with him in the district.þþHis behavior unsettles some Democrats as they seek a prize trophy: the defeat of Representative Thomas M. Reynolds, the chairman of the Republican re-election committee in the House of Representatives. þþ“It keeps me up at night,” said one Democratic operative familiar with Mr. Davis’s independent streak. “And I’m sure I’m not the only one who stays up at night worried about what he’ll say next.”þþAnd with good reason. Democrats in New York and Washington suddenly have a lot riding on Mr. Davis and the relatively unorthodox campaign he has put together using his own money. After months of being written off as a long-shot candidate, Mr. Davis is in what polls indicate is an increasingly tight race with Mr. Reynolds. The independent Cook Political Report is now rating the Reynolds-Davis race a “tossup.”þþMr. Davis’s fortunes changed almost overnight, after Mr. Reynolds and other top Republicans acknowledged in late September that they had been aware for months of unusual e-mail exchanges between Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, and a former teenage page.þþMr. Reynolds has tried to tamp down the controversy, holding news conferences to explain himself and even running a television advertisement saying that he had alerted Speaker J. Dennis Hastert last spring when he first learned of the e-mail messages between Mr. Foley and the young page. Yet questions about whether he did enough to stop Mr. Foley are continuing to dog Mr. Reynolds, and he has not been a particularly visible figure on the campaign trail in recent weeks.þþBut one big wild card for Democrats is Mr. Davis, who captured 44 percent of the vote in his 2004 loss to Mr. Reynolds and who has vowed to spend $2 million of his own money to defeat him this time around. Top party officials privately acknowledge that this is one race that they will have difficulty shaping, given Mr. Davis’s independent streak.þþ“This one is in God’s hands,” said one party official, a national Democratic strategist who did not want to be seen as chastising the party’s own candidate. þþAnyone who has followed Mr. Davis’s career should find none of this particularly surprising. In 2004, he left the Republican Party after a bitter dispute that has become the stuff of banter, if not exactly lore, among political types here.þþThe rift partly stemmed from an episode that occurred at a fund-raiser he attended that featured Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Cheney’s aides asked Mr. Davis to leave after he began talking to reporters about an advertisement he had bought in the local newspaper criticizing the Bush administration’s free-trade policies, according to Mr. Davis’s campaign.þþ“That really stuck in his craw,” said Curtis Ellis, a Davis campaign spokesman. “He was a member of the party his whole life. He gave countless dollars to Republicans. And they shut him down.”þþMr. Davis, who is 73 and married, with 6 children and 13 grandchildren, has deep roots in this region. He grew up in western New York and attended Amherst Central High School. In 1955, he graduated from the University of Buffalo with a bachelor’s degree in engineering.þþHe went on to serve in the Marine Corps Reserves and in the Coast Guard Reserves. In 1964, after leaving the Coast Guard with the rank of lieutenant, he started a company out of his garage that would eventually make him a millionaire. The company, I Squared R Element Company, makes special heating elements for electric furnaces.þþPolitically, Mr. Davis is hard to define, though he has a strong libertarian streak, supporting, for example, both abortion rights and gun rights.þþHe says that he was a Republican for 50 years, first as a Goldwater Republican, then as a Reagan Republican. But he says he became disillusioned with the party because it did not share his disdain for free trade and the multinational corporations that reap its benefits. (He is also critical of Democrats in the free-trade camp.)þþIn fact, until the Congressional page scandal erupted, he had made his anti-free-trade message a focus of the campaign. Again and again, he has argued that free-trade policies supported by Mr. Reynolds have been a major reason that the economically beleaguered region has lost manufacturing jobs to other countries.þþ“Reynolds cannot be trusted to defend your rights, your children’s rights, your job, your farm or your industry,” he said in a speech earlier this year that typifies the populist message he has carried throughout the campaign.þþBut the Reynolds camp has hit back. In a televised ad that began running last month, Mr. Reynolds asserts that Mr. Davis’s plan to increase tariffs on foreign goods to protect American companies “is really a tax increase” on working families. “Millionaire Jack Davis: raising taxes, hurting families,” the spot concludes in a line that irritates Mr. Davis.þþ“He’s trying to make people jealous of my wealth,” Mr. Davis said in a recent interview at his plant, where he employs 75 people. “I got my money the old-fashioned way.”þþMr. Davis is an amiable man with a slender build, a thick head of white hair and a penchant for letting his emotions flow. He got teary several times during the interview at his plant. And on Thursday, during an appearance at a union hall, he was surprisingly blunt in talking about Mr. Foley’s behavior in the page scandal. “If any of my sons had received that kind of letter from anybody, I’d have looked for a baseball bat and gone after the guy,” he said.þþDemocratic officials closely monitoring the race like to say that Mr. Davis would not have had a prayer of winning a Democratic primary if a traditional Democrat had challenged him for the party’s nomination to run against Mr. Reynolds.þþBut the fact that Mr. Davis does not have a pure Democratic pedigree may turn out to be one of his greatest assets running in New York’s 26th Congressional District, a Republican bastion that runs between the suburbs of Buffalo and Rochester.þþ“All the ways that Tom Reynolds would normally try to defeat a Democratic rival are off limits with Jack Davis,” said Blake Zeff, a spokesman for the New York State Democratic Party. “He can’t call Davis a liberal because it clearly isn’t true. He can’t tie him to national Democrats who might be unpopular in the district because people know Jack’s a maverick who isn’t taking his pointers from anyone but himself.”þþ
Source: NY Times
