A disastrous dalliance

LITTLE ROCK — “Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.”

—Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

At least the Arkansas Democratic Party, otherwise in a free fall, still had a one-man farm team.

Dustin McDaniel was the logical and only evident heir to the party’s damaged mantle of electable progressives. He stood next in line after Bumpers, Pryor, Clinton, Beebe.

He was young. He was smart. He was a competent attorney general. He had an Eastern Arkansas political base to soften the occasional center-left position. He could shoot waterfowl. He had declared for governor in 2014 and already raised a million dollars. He was the presumptive nominee.

Why all the past tense?

It’s because last week, the farm team blew up.

McDaniel found it advisable Tuesday to issue a public statement saying he’d engaged, in 2011, in a limited relationship with a woman lawyer in Hot Springs. He said the relationship had become briefly inappropriate. He said he was sorry and that he and his wife had prayed on it and were moving on and that he would continue to run for governor.

All right, then. So we have a philandering politician who professes to pray. What else is new?

For one thing, McDaniel is not yet an established political force, like, say, Bill Clinton, who could call on a career’s accomplishment to help him survive such revelations.

McDaniel is in the process of presenting himself to voters, and now his first calling card will be R-rated.

His money-raising ought to slow, for one thing, and perhaps the main thing.

Secondly, this is curiously a little more of a mess than a simple indiscretion. There are peripheral . . . well, let’s call them distractions, factors, complications.

The woman with whom McDaniel entangled himself—a 34-year-old Hot Springs lawyer named Andrea “Andi” Davis, described as “nice-looking with a kind of vulnerable side that appeals to some people”—happens to be in a Garland County child-custody battle with her podiatrist ex-husband.

This ex-husband has dared, in a public court filing, to ask her about assorted alleged misbehaviors, only one of which was a Dustin dalliance.

She tried to deflect all the questions, objecting to their relevance. But somebody emailed copies of these queries to assorted reporters, columnists and bloggers, and a couple of them presumed to ask Dustin directly.

So the attorney general pondered the situation and decided it was better to admit his sin now and commence trying to weather the storm than to let the thing fester or come out on him in some other way.

But Andi Davis might not be the first entanglement partner you’d pick if you wanted to have a brief dalliance for which you could issue a simple confession and then survive in a race for governor of the state.

I must stress that the public baggage that can become attached to a person is not always fair. But there is some here:

1. At the time of the aforementioned entanglement, Davis was the lawyer in a school-choice lawsuit against the state, which was represented in the matter by, of course, the attorney general. There is some precedent for bringing a professionalconduct complaint against a lawyer who gets involved intimately with opposing counsel and doesn’t tell his client.

Now to be fair: The start of the case, still on appeal, long pre-dated the dalliance, and there was no change in the state’s procedures or tactics or arguments after the dalliance.

And to continue being fair: The attorney general mainly runs for governor while staff lawyers do the actual legal work. So any conflict would be more a matter of principle than practice.

The staff lawyer likely would have been too busy to dally.

1. Alas, a man was shot to death in February in Davis’ driveway. She was detained for questioning. No charges have been filed against anybody. She is presumed wholly innocent, of course.

But if you are running for governor and you admit to a dalliance of this sort, it is not the best thing if the newspaper has a file photo of the person with whom you have dallied being led away in handcuffs for questioning in a homicide.

1. Davis has had a running feud with Garland Circuit Judge Marcia Hearnsberger, who once cited her for displaying too much cleavage in court. It was distracting the prisoners, the judge thought.

And Davis went out and told the Arkansas Times: “I admit I have boobs, and I like them.”

Now there’s a quote for you.

This may well have been largely a personality conflict between a prim and proper judge and a more casual country-girl lawyer from Wickes. Of course it’s probably incumbent on the lawyer in such a case to adapt to the judge rather than the other way around.

But then, on Tuesday, the day McDaniel confessed, Davis apparently didn’t show up to represent a criminal defendant in a proceeding before Hearnsberger. That’s based on the judge’s subsequent order to have Davis come in next month and explain why she shouldn’t be held in contempt of court.

I’m just asking: If you’re going to run for governor as the Last Democratic Hope and have a fling along the way, is this the right fling to have?

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.