The story of 2013 in Arkansas politics is that Republicans should have had everything going their way-with Obamacare detested ever more widely and intensely in a state that ought to be desperate for it-but didn’t.
Arkansas Republicans enter 2014, possibly the most seminal election year in Arkansas since Winthrop Rockefeller’s historic victory in 1966, at some degree of risk of squandered opportunity.
They are in danger of failing to take full advantage of the favorable mood, of failing to win either the governorship or the U.S. Senate seat, and of losing their slim majority in the state House of Representatives. They’re not even cinches for a couple of congressional vacancies.
It’s because Arkansas Democrats have a plan, and Arkansas Republicans have anti-Obama rage and internal conflicts about how to apply it. -
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That Republicans’ rage might be enough, even with that conflict between their Tea Party zealots and their more competent and pragmatic state legislators who advanced and supported the private option for Medicaid expansion.
But Asa Hutchinson, their certain gubernatorial nominee, is a three-time loser of statewide races who has never successfully warmed to an electorate that historically chooses its governor on a basis of personality more than ideology.
And Tom Cotton, their U.S. Senate nominee, is a little-known young man whose heroic resume is mitigated by extreme positions and a cool and aloof manner, one that produced pervasive reports of recently underwhelming public addresses at the Downtown Little Rock Rotary Club and the Little Rock Political Animals Club.
Meanwhile, the Democratic plan-to run non-ideological veterans of competent government performance-is not to be taken lightly in a state that may hold vestiges of an eccentric tendency to contradict itself politically.
Arkansas is perhaps still perfectly capable of going Republican in the main, and yet remaining Democratic with Mike Ross in the Governor’s Mansion and Mark Pryor in the U.S. Senate; or leaning Democratic in the 2nd District with the veteran former mayor of North Little Rock, Pat Hays, and in the 4th District with the veteran former Yell County judge and national FEMA director, James Lee Witt; or giving Democrats regained control of the state House of Representatives with a transfer of only three seats.
The Republicans’ message is that Barack Obama is bad and Obamacare worse, and that these Arkansas Democrats, no matter what they say otherwise, are inevitably enablers of that president and the new health-insurance law.
The Democrats’ message is that their candidates know how to make government work non-ideologically and that they don’t care at all for Obama but are proud friends and allies and disciples of a couple of Arkansas Democrats, one named Mike Beebe and the other Bill Clinton.
One of them is running the state very well, and the other ran the state and nation pretty well.
Both Beebe and Clinton will make appearances next year in our campaign media and on the campaign trail.
After this governor of 60-plus approval ratings gets February’s fiscal session of the Legislature behind him, he is intending, or so I am told, to join Ross at the hip and present the Blue Dog congressman as his natural heir.
And Clinton will jet in from time to time to explain that Witt ran the Federal Emergency Management Agency with famous effectiveness, and that Hays learned as mayor of a major city that good government can never shut down.
Clinton will surely mention that Ross learned, as his campaign driver 30 years ago, how to stay in touch with the people, and that Pryor is nobly conspicuous in the U.S. Senate for seeking middle ground to solve problems.
Republicans will counter as follows: Obama. Obama. Obama. Obamacare. Obamacare. Obamacare. As a GOP campaign consultant told me the other day: If you’re gaining 20 yards every time you run up the middle, why change the play?
The issue is whether the Arkansas Democratic defense is actually better than that.
In November of next year, after something nearing $50 million gets spent with our local television stations, Arkansas will decide whether it remains a place of charming political contradiction or, as I like to say, becomes “Oklabama,” just another Southern state fully baptized in the gospel that Democrats are so yesterday.
Will the Rockefeller reform era survive in remnants?
Or will it be replaced in total by the dawn of a new right-wing era arising from the irreparable damage inflicted by a Democratic president the state simply couldn’t stand?
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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, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial, Pages 75 on 12/29/2013