Everyone to their corners

LITTLE ROCK — Ididn’t think the biggest story of the night was that more than 60,000 people, constituting 42 percent, voted against President Barack Obama in the Democratic primary. I was surprised and relieved it wasn’t more.

I thought the biggest story was that Arkansas politics became more polarized.

The right went more to the right and hunkered in its bunker. The left went more to the left and hunkered in its bunker.

Bipartisan cooperation and solutions floated away with the not-sogentle breeze.

We now move insistently in Arkansas toward a tone and tenor that have worked so well in Washington. Always late to national trends, Arkansas is only now deciding to get on board with stridence and distrust and dysfunction.

To make my point, I juxtapose two state Senate races.

In Benton County, state Rep. Tim Summers, a thoroughly conservative legislator with close ties to thoroughly conservative Wal-Mart, made a Senate bid. He did so in a district that Gov. Mike Beebe actually got quoted as saying—as if in jest, but probably seriously—that he had drawn to enhance Summers’ electability.

You see, Summers was the kind of Republican you could get along with. He’d meet you in the middle every once in a while.

He voted, for example, to refer to the voters—to leave to the voters’ choice—whether to raise the sales tax for a highway bond program. He wouldn’t vote for the tax directly, but he’d give the people their say. And he’d give a highway program—so vital to Northwest Arkansas—a chance.

So he paid a price Tuesday for being Beebe’s favorite Republican and for being the state Highway Commission’s favorite Republican and for being a defender of the people’s right to decide something for themselves.

He got narrowly defeated by Bart Hester of Cave Springs. Hester had the backing of the Koch brothers and their Americans for Prosperity, which sent out attack flyers against Summers’ reasonableness.

Why, these anti-government extremists exclaimed, Summers had “advanced” hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.

Advanced? That’s an interesting word.

Summers had said to let the people vote. Direct democracy—that’s what he advanced.

We can’t have that. You let the Highway Commission go to the people with a tax and somebody out there might make the mistake of voting for it.

You can’t trust the people like that. They might actually find something in government to like. Don’t you see?

So now to juxtapose: Hester will proceed to join a state Senate to which—from central Little Rock—that last liberal lioness, Joyce Elliott, was overwhelmingly renominated on Tuesday. That was in spite of—and partly because of—publicity about her taking a state job illegally and having unpaid taxes.

Nothing energizes a bunker like attack from the evil forces.

Elliott drubbed state Rep. Fred Allen after accusing him of being against federal health-care reform. In fact, amiable Fred actually sponsored and carried the water last year for the embattled legislation despised by Republicans to establish state healthcare exchanges to implement federal health-care reform.

Apparently the bogus charge resonated. Or maybe the left-leaning constituency of central Little Rock simply decided to say to heck with you bleepety-bleeps with all your rightwing incursions toward our bunker.

I think that’s probably what it was. The more the other side despises you, the more your side rallies to you. This is the political calculus of the day.

I figure these two—Bart Hester of Cave Springs and Joyce Elliott of Little Rock—are going to get along handsomely, so determined are their constituencies to work for practical solutions to our problems. These are best friends in waiting.

I’m being ironic, in case you failed to pick up on that.

Republicans and state business leaders intend to push school-choice reforms—more charter schools, more general public-school competition—in the next session. Now they may run squarely into Elliott, a former schoolteacher whose idea of publiceducation policy is to defend, simply and completely, the teachers’ organizations and the status quo. It also is to assail those who disagree as enemies of teachers and schools and kids.

Elliott appears set up by seniority for a good shot at the chairmanship of the Senate Education Committee. From there she could singularly mess with, maybe even vex and stymie, bigbusiness types advancing what they consider to be education reforms.

There is a middle ground on that. Or there was.

My point is that Tim Summers and Fred Allen could have worked something out on such trivial matters as these, on schools and highways. And that is precisely why they were denied the opportunity.

Someone chimed in Tuesday night on my live blog chat that Fred Allen ought to be ashamed of himself for even running against Joyce Elliott.

Ashamed? Isn’t it enough he got drubbed?

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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.