The Era of Ennui

While you attended the high school football game or county fair, the candidates to leave you uninspired for the next four years debated on television.

The over-arching conclusion arising from the Mike Ross-Asa Hutchinson tussle Friday night from the studios of KARK-TV in Little Rock was as follows: An Era of Ennui looms for our state.

We face this certainty: After decades of politically talented, magnetic and personality-rich governors--Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Mike Beebe, folks who could joke and charm and deflect and even uplift--next year will present a jarring change indeed.

Next year will be the year in Arkansas when the music died.

No more saxophone. No more bass guitar. Only an a cappella atonality.


Ross is like a well-trained, intense and generally competent basketball player except for one flaw--his shots, which bang hard against the rim like bricks.

"Am I going too fast for you?" Ross barked at Hutchinson at one point in the debate.

Oh, dear. Ham-fisted ridicule of another seldom works politically, or anywhere. Touch is knowing not to dare say such a thing.

Hutchinson could have been a burglar. He's in the building, but you don't notice him.

His debate performance would have been the same had he gone to the wrong television station.

Hutchinson appeared momentarily stunned when Ross essentially called him stupid. But Asa almost always seems momentarily stunned. He has an internal two-second delay before he reacts.

It's off-putting, but it'll keep you from venturing into ham-fisted ridicule of your opponent.

Issues? The big difference is that Ross would expand pre-K for 4-year-olds to make it a universal opportunity over several years, and Hutchinson wouldn't because ... well, I don't know. He said something, but he must have been going too slow for me.

These two argued most about tax cuts, on which both are wrong, but for entirely different reasons.

Hutchinson intends to cut income taxes for the middle class by $100 million though state government needs to hang on to that money for a rainy day, schools, prisons and to pick up the slight eventual slack on the nationally renowned private-option form of Medicaid expansion.

Ross has laid out a half-billion-dollar tax cut for everybody through wholesale reform of antiquated income-tax rates. But he has said he will implement it only piecemeal from the bottom up as can be afforded--meaning never.

He offers pie in the sky with six-inch meringue.

A governor of California, Ronald Reagan, began the use of tax cuts to buy political popularity. Now a governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback, is experiencing the inevitable mathematical consequences. Arkansas seems determined to become "Alsokansas."

Ross says he'll be the education governor. Hutchinson says he'll be the jobs governor.

What we need is a good governor for everything, one who possesses the touch to say the education governor and the jobs governor are the same governor.

On the aforementioned private option, it's this way:

• Ross is absolutely in favor of continuing it, but will have big trouble getting the votes from petty neanderthals in a Republican Legislature.

• Hutchinson, the man who isn't there, won't take a stand, but would inevitably try to extend the private option and probably have easier success than Ross. Republican legislators would go along with their Republican governor. Democratic legislators--imagine this--would do the right thing.

The fact is that the only clear difference--the issue of expanding pre-K opportunities for perpetually disadvantaged Arkansas kids--is reason enough to support Ross.

But four years of hearing shots clanging like bricks off the rim would be a high price to pay.

If Hutchinson wins, we'll have four years of arithmetical challenge and trying to remember who the governor is.

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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 09/23/2014

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