A new game plan

Back in the 2000s when he was dabbling in punditry before finding his calling as a legislator, Republican state Sen. David Sanders of Little Rock talked a right-wing foundation into giving him a grant.

It was to study why Arkansas lagged well behind the rest of the South in tumbling into rampant Republicanism.

He found the obvious factors: The racial makeup distinguished Arkansas as did the uncommon talent of Democratic white-establishment politicians who could appeal to white rural conservatives and keep the liberal subsets at bay while in the fold.

But Sanders concluded further: Time and again in the modern era, Republicans have made their move in Arkansas only to to see the state’s Democrats huddle up and produce a strong and ultimately successful resistance, sometimes with the help of Republican blunders.

Republican Ed Bethune got elected to Congress from the 2nd District in 1978, but the Democrats took it back in 1984. Republican Frank White defeated Gov. Bill Clinton in 1980 only to see Clinton win the rematch two years later.

Republican Tim Hutchinson got elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, but, in 2002, Mark Pryor, son of the Democrat whose seat Hutchinson won, defeated him. Republican Jay Dickey got elected to Congress in the 4th District in 1992, but then lost to a hard-toiling state senator from Prescott, Mike Ross, in 2000.

So now we come toward 2014. This is the big one.

The Tea Party revolt put Republicans in all four of the state’s U.S. House seats and delivered to Republicans historic majorities in both chambers of the state Legislature.

At stake in 2014 is the governor’s office, from where Mike Beebe has managed to keep order. Also in play are all seven statewide constitutional offices, which officially determine majority party status in the state.

Arkansas Democrats have huddled up. Theirs was an uncommonly long huddle this time.

Now they’ve broken the huddle and commenced their plan. It is a good one. It is the best they conceivably could design in these circumstances. They are making a credible play to foil the Republicans yet again.

Republicans at the legislative level haven’t blundered so much, thanks to the competent pragmatism of Sanders, House Speaker Davy Carter, state Rep. John Burris, state Sen. Jonathan Dismang, state Sen. Johnny Key and Senate President Pro Tem Michael Lamoureux.

But Congress is a different story. Recent Arkansas polling shows people not distinguishing or discerning the truth that Republicans were entirely to blame for the shutdown debacle. But it does show Arkansas voters enraged by Washington incumbents. And there are more Republican incumbents than Democratic incumbents in the state’s Washington delegation.

And there’s a complicated split of incumbency in the U.S. Senate race, with Pryor, who worked on the final deal to end the shutdown, opposed by a GOP congressman all smeared up by the disastrous shutdown tactic, Tom Cotton.

There is a reason all four Republican House members-Cotton, Tim Griffin, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack-voted for the final shutdown-ending deal last Wednesday night. It’s that they had gathered that, in Arkansas, the shutdown was threatening to hurt them, even starting to hurt them.

The Democrats’ first move is to put forward their best lineup of “Arkansas” Democrats, meaning white-establishment males with records of success and of distinguishing themselves from national Democrats.

Those would be Pryor for re-election to the Senate and Ross for governor. You have there the white, establishment Democratic male who beat Hutchinson and the one who beat Dickey.

Their second move is to embrace Ross’ party-building ideas. He believes he can help bring along a few Democratic candidacies to win state House seats and reverse what would be a short-lived Republican majority. The GOP margin is but 52-48.

Their third move is to pump Democratic enthusiasm into congressional races by offering strong candidates-white-male establishment types again-who can say they have a demonstrated record of making government work in a transpartisan way.

To be specific: Democrats hope to run James Lee Witt, the Yell County good ol’ boy who ran FEMA spectacularly well for the Clinton administration, in the 4th District. In the 2nd District they intend to run Pat Hays, the long-term nonpartisan mayor of North Little Rock who, the occasional submarine eccentricity aside, ran the city with effectiveness.

Here is the message of Witt and Hays: The people in Washington shut down the government. (No party mention necessary or advised). But we know how to make government work. Send us up there to straighten that mess out.

As yet there is no such transpartisan Democratic can-do candidate in the 1st District.

Could it work? I think so.

But be advised of a countering argument: There are Republicans who think none of that matters this time because Pryor voted for Obamacare and Ross gave it a vote in committee. They think that means game over.

The Republicans tend to run a no-huddle offense. They simply get to the line of scrimmage and bark “Obamacare.” It’s produced touchdowns so far.

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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.