Democrats' hot topics

Arkansas Democrats, who don't have much to party about, tried anyway Saturday night at their Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner.

About 2,000 of them ambled about in the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock, where air conditioning was inadequate.

Even when Hillary Clinton was delivering a video message on the screen--saying "let them come to Mike Beebe's Arkansas" if they want to see good government--the Democrats milled about inattentively.

A woman told me she was glad she wasn't seated at Beebe's table. She said he hates being hot and turns irritable on such occasions.

(A little insider nugget: Sometimes he can be a little irritable even when the air conditioning is good.)

That was about 6:30 p.m. Three hours later, when Beebe finally delivered the keynote and closing address, perhaps after a couple of glasses of wine for essential quenching, he declared that the Democrats ought to get at least 75 percent of their rent money back.

"It's too damned hot in here," he said, not for humorous effect, but to call out the convention-center people.


Beebe is famously nonpartisan as governor.

He let Jason Rapert sponsor his grocery-tax cut. Recently he spoke at a county Democratic dinner and spent time extolling the private-option leadership of certain Republican legislators.

So I wondered how partisan he would be--could be--on this purposely partisan occasion. That's why I perched for three hours on the media riser--where no other local media people were to be found--and sat through the over-long processional of congressional and statewide constitutional candidates.

That's not to mention state Chairman Vince Insalaco's extended metaphor about the Wizard of Oz. (The Republicans don't have a heart or a brain and the Koch brothers of Kansas are pulling the strings at Oz. Or something like that.)

So this is precisely how partisan Beebe could be: Reporters have asked him, he told the crowd, why he hadn't become a Republican along the way like so many other Southern fiscal conservatives who achieved personal financial success after extreme childhood poverty.

He said it was because Democratic policies lifted him and gave him opportunity.

He said the Republicans he least respects are the new-monied latecomers who forget they owe their opportunity to Democratic policies.

Well, OK, then. But I must point out that the governor was extolling the 80-year-old Democratic heritage--first FDR and then his own hero, JFK--and saying nothing about the reasons for being a Democrat today.

And we know exactly why that is. Today's progressivism is about equal opportunity for gays and a national health-care law--overwhelming poll-losers in Arkansas, which will come to embrace them only grudgingly and generationally.

Being in the moral vanguard seldom offers short-term political benefit. Its only reward is the morality itself.

Otherwise, this event was about Mike Ross.

I had barely entered the convention hall before I was accosted for writing that Ross hasn't been connecting on a personal level--but that Republican Asa Hutchinson has been--in the governor's race.

Why, Ross delivered a powerfully engaging address earlier that day at the state Democratic convention, I was advised.

"It's the same speech I give six days a week on the campaign trail," Ross told me a little later.

So he gave an abridged version later in the evening at the dinner.

Indeed it's a good speech, crisp, heavy with substance about the real differences between him and Hutchinson--on pre-K education, career work-force education, the private option, taxes and the minimum wage.

Republicans have taken to calling Ross "angry." It's a tactical besmirching.

It arises from the fact that his delivery tends to come across as stern in these matters of substance.

Republicans deflect the substance by embracing the style.

Ross' speeches sometimes lack any softening or personalizing interlude. And that was the case Saturday night.

I recommend a white Labrador retriever puppy, a future gun-dog worthy of the duck blind, but, for now, mainly good for licking Ross in the face between weighty points of important substance.

Oh, and there also was this matter Saturday evening: U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor spoke, so softly I couldn't hear him.

But that's no matter. What will win for him is Tom Cotton's being heard.

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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 on 08/26/2014

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