John Timothy Griffin

Tim Griffin appears in the doorway of the two-story Greek Revival house he had built in 2008 from a vision in his head. It's the middle of the week, the middle of the afternoon, the middle of the Heights. About the fourth thing he says is "I tend to start talking and keep talking until someone ..." and it's pretty much like that for two hours.

The state's 20th lieutenant governor is an affable, brainy magpie. Sometimes he answers a reporter's question with a long digression, and sometimes he digresses and there's no answer, but he's never rude, and he's never inauthentic, and he never disengages.

"You like motorcycles? You should get to know them."

He has six in his garage, and not Harley-Davidsons. Suzukis, Hondas. Well, one Harley. He says, "You gotta know that I worked briefly at a motorcycle shop in the early '80s" like this context is the unifying detail for the rest of his biography.

On another occasion, he says, "I cooked some trout last night -- this is all off the record. Well, it doesn't matter." (He's proud of his cooking, and catholic of palate: he's deft around a spice rack and loves curries.)

Here's something very much on the record. The lieutenant governor and his wife, Elizabeth, are chairmen of the third annual Salute gala for ARVets, a charity born of former Gov. Mike Beebe's yellow-ribbon panel devoted to seeing that veterans get the services and the honors owed to them. The black-tie event is $150, and it's on Veterans Day -- Wednesday -- at the Clinton Presidential Center.

"The lieutenant governor's spirit is so robust. Everybody knows who he is. He's kind of been our bullhorn out there saying, 'This is a great event,'" says ARVets director Nicole Hart.

Of course, it helps that he's a combat veteran. He has been an Army reservist for nearly 20 years.

"I had a veterans advisory committee when I was in Congress," Griffin says, and "a very, very active staff ... dealing with veterans affairs."

Griffin's sitting in a leather armchair inside the second-floor library. The house is modeled on a building that Thomas Jefferson designed on the campus of the University of Virginia.

There are tons, literally, tons of books in the house. "I guess that's something I could show you." The living room, the office, the garage, hallways between them -- Baker's Encyclopedia of Psychology, Berlin 1961, Spurgeon's Sermons, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. One with filigreed lettering says United States Report; inside, it's stamped Senate Library 1923. "That's the U.S. Senate. I'm not gonna get -- United States Senate Library -- I'm not gonna get rid of that!"

A graduate of the law school at Tulane University, Griffin knows most review of law takes place before a computer screen, but he can't pitch any of the old tomes.

A call comes up the stairs from wife Elizabeth. She's going to get the kids. OK. The kids are Mary, 8, and John, 5, students at Forest Park Elementary just a few blocks away. When Griffin announced that he would not run a third time for the 2nd District seat he first won in 2010, these kids were the reason he gave. "You just can't get these years back."

Speaking of which, it's exactly 365 days until the next presidential election. Do you know who your candidate is? Griffin, like nearly every state- and federal-level Republican official in Arkansas, has thrown his support behind the last Republican governor of the state, Mike Huckabee.

When the dust clears, count on Griffin to stand full-throated behind the Republican nominee. He came to his 2nd District Congressional seat riding a wave of tea party opprobrium following the Democratic high tide of 2008; but he says he's a Republican and "not a subset of a Republican."

His earliest political memory was a jejune, wholly unpredictive one -- a third-grade mock presidential ballot. He picked the Democrat Jimmy Carter over the incumbent, Gerald Ford. Recalling it now is like sucking on a lemon, or so it looks.

Early vacations often found the family on Civil War battlefields, at the House of the Seven Gables or Faneuil Hall. He considers those formative political experiences, too. (Oh, what he would give to have sat in on the Constitutional Convention.)

He was too small for football. Played some Little League. His mother says he started reading at an early age, advanced texts, too, and that most of his progress and goals were entirely self-directed.

"He was a strong-willed child," says mom Lavonia Griffin, citing James Dobson's 1992 best-seller The Strong-Willed Child. "He was definitely a strong-willed child, but that was good." "A strong-willed child, when you get that will directed, you can't stop a strong-willed child."

He was the son of a preacher and a teacher, both Ouachita Baptist University alumni. Griffin's family moved when he was in sixth grade from Charlotte, N.C., to his mother's birthplace, Magnolia, where he finished his public schooling. His hardest subject was math, though he finally majored in economics.

Griffin likes to say he's a true product of the '80s. He started junior high school in 1980 and graduated from college in 1990. At Hendrix College he was surrounded by Democrats a breed apart from the likes of state Sen. Bill "Friendly" Henley, whose campaigns he'd volunteered for twice in high school. The first meeting of college Democrats featured some aspersions cast at his favorite president -- the president, Ronald Reagan -- and he was out.

"Hendrix politics is obviously different. I mean, Jay Barth was the president of our class. What does that tell ya?"

Griffin spent two years at Oxford, where his Pembroke schoolmaster was Sir Roger Bannister, who ran the first sub-4-minute mile. Perhaps it was inevitable then that, one day, Griffin would run for something.

OPPOSITION RESEARCH

At the top of an enormous stack of books in Griffin's library-office is a four-inch binder stamped "Bring It On: The Real Deal on John Kerry."

"I'm not real big on having this in the article," he grumbles, but obliges. It's filled with debate transcripts from Kerry's 1990 Senate race.

Almost no one I talked to failed to say that Griffin is a nice and honest (and very accessible) official, but it's also true that he came to national politics first as a lawyer investigating the misconduct of high-profile Democrats like Henry Cisneros, and later as an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee.

What is opposition research? As it happens, Griffin explained it in an oft-repeated analogy. Before he was well known in Arkansas, he had a star turn in a BBC documentary about the 2000 race titled Digging the Dirt. In it, beside a sign that reads "ON MY COMMAND -- UNLEASH HELL (ON AL)," Griffin tells the camera, "We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. We make the bullets."

In 2000, he managed a staff of 30 opposition researchers digging into Vice President Al Gore's past. Leading up to the 2004 presidential race, he was research director and deputy communications director. Afterward, he was named deputy director of political affairs beneath Sara Fagen (nee Taylor), who reported to Karl Rove. It earned Griffin the sobriquet "Karl Rove's protege" from about 2005 to his election to Congress in 2010.

This was driven home in 2006 and 2007 when he replaced the state's federal prosecutor for the Eastern District, Bud Cummins, after a crop of U.S. attorney dismissals. Two months after his interim appointment, Griffin said he was withdrawing from consideration for permanent appointment by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee amid quite a bit of rancor between him and Arkansas' two Democratic senators.

Just a few months earlier he had been in Mosul, Iraq -- active duty with the 101st Airborne Division.

He needed a break.

ELECTED OFFICE

In the two years before his election to Congress in 2010, Griffin started The Griffin Law Firm and Griffin Public Affairs LLC and briefly but publicly considered a run to replace U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010. Instead, he successfully ran for retiring Democratic Rep. Vic Snyder's 2nd District seat.

That election cycle, Arkansas was represented in Washington by five Democrats and one Republican. By the end of that election, only two Democrats remained; then, in 2012, just one. Today, there isn't a single Democrat at the federal level or among the state constitutional officers.

"The key for any one-party rule is to make sure there's still a war of ideas," he says. "You can still have a loyal opposition, but it will be within your own party, and I believe that's not unhealthy."

Despite a successful tenure in Congress highlighted by Griffin's appointment to what many consider the most coveted committee in the House -- Ways and Means -- he surprised his staff and his constituency by running not for re-election in 2014 but to fill the state's vacated lieutenant governor's office.

His former chief of staff, Clayton Hall, says it's unusual for first- or second-term congressmen to get on Ways and Means. "It's trade policy, almost all the entitlement programs, the tax code," he said. "He put a lot of time and energy into convincing his colleagues ... he was capable of dealing with it. ... You don't just put popular members on there. You have to [be] substantive."

Hall has three children a little younger than Griffin's, so when he says "if you know Tim, you know his family's first," it's with audible admiration. (After serving in the office of two previous congressmen, Hall made Griffin his last. He now works for a trade association.)

But Griffin's also clearly invested in politics as a candidate. He waited only a short time before announcing his interest in the lieutenant governor's office. At the time, some in the capital were wondering whether such an office should exist at all. Griffin says it's important to have a line of succession -- that's why the office was created.

"Twice in the last 20 years it was important to have a line of succession," he says. (When Bill Clinton became president and when his successor, Jim Guy Tucker, was indicted.)

More than that, in the best of cases, the officeholder truly acts as a governor's lieutenant. Within a month of taking office, Gov. Asa Hutchinson picked him to lead a task force of 16 stakeholders to recommend how Arkansas should implement the national Common Core standards that have been adopted by most states.

"I purposefully looked for witnesses that I knew would be at odds. I learn when people are at odds, because ... that's the way a court's built. Out of the debate, out of the adversarial process, you will distill the facts."

Griffin is determined not to stumble over the same ethics violations that felled his immediate predecessor, says his former chief of staff and 2014 campaign manager, Annamarie Atwood. "He demanded that every t is crossed, every i was dotted, and that we obsessively follow ethics laws, and that," during the campaign, "if something wasn't going to be perceived well, then we didn't do it.

"That carried over into the lieutenant governor's office, where he really has continued to demand that we make sure that everything is by the books, and honestly" -- here she laughs -- "I feel bad for the lawyers over at the ethics commission. There'd be days I would call them two and three times a day just to ask them almost silly questions, just to make sure that there'd be no question."

Is it too early to start talking about a Gov. Griffin in 2022?

"We just started," he protests. "The governor just started. He's got a lot of stuff he wants to do; I've got a lot of stuff I'm looking to do. Stuff we can work together on.

"We've got a lot of time before we worry about what's next."

NAN Profiles on 11/08/2015