It came like a breath of fresh air in a smoke-filled room when Jeremy Gillam, speaker of the Arkansas House, said it: "We're all in this together. We're going to succeed as a state. We're going to fail as a state." And added that any pain involved in cutting the state's budget should be "shared equally in a responsible manner."
Can you believe it? State government might actually start living within its means instead of just switching folks to Medicaid and calling it the Private Option when it's really a public one. If the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names, we haven't even started to climb out of our self-inflicted ignorance. There's a sucker born every minute, and somebody eager to take him to the cleaners, or maybe just the state lottery.
To quote state Senator Alan Clark (R-Lonsdale), "The whole idea here is to scare folks so they'll call me and tell me that we have to take that $1.6 billion from the federal government." He's figured it out. Call it the Big Bluff, and it's been known to work.
Far from calming the madding crowd, our governor is leading it. The Hon. Asa Hutchinson has issued a lengthy press release asserting that the cuts in just one division of state government, Children and Family Services, would prove "devastating." And the same scare talk is being circulated by every head of every department of state government looking out only for its own narrow interest instead of the state's as a whole.
Then there are all the private interests who have a stake in this shell game. Plus, well, you name it. Everybody wants to get into the act. Hospitals, universities, school districts and anybody and everybody who trades with them . . . Come one, come all. This web is worldwide.
It's an old tried-and-failed tactic favored by any and all chief executives confronted by a public that refuses to be ordered around by its betters: Cut the Police and Fire Departments First so the pain is felt, and felt hard. Just so long as the services provided are clear, essential, and visible and the pain much too obvious to ignore. Democracy, the late great H.L. Mencken said, is a system that gives the people what they want--good and hard.
Bill Clinton roped off favorite tourist sites like the Washington Monument, explaining that, what th' heck, he couldn't help it if Congress had decided to balance the federal budget on his back. It wasn't his doing.
Call it the Big Bluff, and it works every time--at least on the gullible and credulous. It's always worth a try even if Republicans and other spoilsports see right through it, and understand just what's going on. But they're inevitably painted as the Bad Guys who keep We the People from enjoying our own parks, monuments and other recreational spots. Or even visiting national cemeteries. Both the quick and the dead must be dragged into this political dispute.
It's politics--and business--as all too usual in this state and country and world. Corruption doesn't have to be blatant to be corruption; it can be subtle, slick and systematic. Whether it's being practiced here by some homegrown slickster or a foreign autocrat like Vlad the Terrible--or as Gertrude Stein might put it, corruption is corruption is corruption.
That it's a cheap trick doesn't mean it can't cost a lot. Stay tuned. In the Great Game of Politics, these smooth customers have just begun to mess with our ever more perfect Union and modest attempts to assure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and see to the general welfare.
Why not just calm down instead? It would be a nice change from politics as all too usual in this small, wonderful but all too easily misled state.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 04/20/2016