COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Advice from the old guy

The Young Democrats of Arkansas, of which there are some, have graciously invited me to come to their convention Friday afternoon and share my “unique” perspective on their party.

It’ll be the Young Democrats and the old curmudgeon.

I first told them they surely didn’t want me, considering that I thought Arkansas Democrats were pathetic, which I’m not at all sure is a unique perspective. They replied that such a view provided all the more reason to invite me. You have to admire that.

So, sure, I’ll drop by. And let me make clear my bipartisanship, or, more precisely, nonpartisanship: If the Young Republicans want to invite me over to tell them how pathetic they also are, I’d be happy to do that as well. It might be a little longer presentation. I’d have to cover the two wings of the contemporary Republican Party: the Donald Trump nukes-for-everybody wing and the Ted Cruz snake-oil wing.

I am not a Democrat. I am a newspaper columnist who tries to tell the truth and therefore I often, but not always, sound like a Democrat.

So I’ve been thinking about what I will say to these Young Democrats. And I thought I’d think about that aloud in this space today. After all, it’s my online-only column, and young Democrats, I figure, are online-only. Maybe some of them would see this column on their phones and use it as a valuable primer for Friday’s big event.

The online-only format is best for this topic because I need more space to explore what’s wrong with Arkansas Democrats than the printed Voices page provides.

My historical perspective on the Arkansas Democratic Party is that its heyday in my personal observation, meaning for more than a half-century until the coup d’etat against it in 2010, was as a passive default location. It stood for nothing other than the irrational nominal coalition of wholly disjointed parts reflecting the Arkansas cultural trends that had everything to do with individual political personalities but nothing to do with an organized, much less cohesive, party.

The Arkansas Democratic Party of my observation was the Orval Faubus-Jim Johnson-Bruce Bennett segregationist party in the 1950s and 1960s, a condition reformed not by the Democrats, but by a liberal New York-transplanted Republican named Winthrop Rockefeller.

After that the Arkansas Democratic Party became a place to collect filing fees and hold occasional parties euphemistically referred to as committee meetings. Arkansas politics was happily dominated by a new era of modernizing, moderate politicians who were Democrats but who had not been given life from Democrats but by the courageous, transformative work by Rockefeller.

From the ’70s through 2010, the leading political organizations in the state were the Dale Bumpers organization, the David Pryor organization and the Bill Clinton organization. So when those guys retired or fled to become president, the party was only as strong as the new generation of candidates. As a cult of personality, it couldn’t beat Mike Huckabee. But Mike Beebe managed for eight twilight years to galvanize the remnants of the Bumpers, Pryor and Clinton organizations. I sometimes wonder if voters didn’t think Mike Beebe was Mike Huckabee with a typo.

Through it all, people running as Democrats held 90 percent of legislative seats and all statewide constitutional offices and all the congressional seats except the one from the alien Kansas-like northwest corner.

But these were merely nominal “D’s,” covering rural right-wingers, city liberals, blacks and … well, Republicans. The Democratic Party once had an executive director, name of Craig Campbell, who professed himself a Nixon voter. I kid you not.

The irrelevance of the state Democratic Party was well-exemplified in 1996 when an opening arose for the 2nd District congressional seat in central Arkansas. Mark Stodola had come up through the state and national Young Democrats organization, and he sought the nomination almost presumptively, at least in the view of the party apparatus, such as it was. But along came a more iconoclastic and independently arising and resume-impressive Democratic candidate in Vic Snyder, a doctor and lawyer and Marine and generally principled liberal state senator. And Snyder won the nomination, then the seat.

Individual political excellence has always been the premium, not the party.

As Bill Clinton’s aide Betsey Wright liked to say, the Arkansas of those days was inaccurately called a one-party Democratic state. She said it actually was a “no-party state.” The “D” meant default, not Democrat.

So then, beginning in 2010 and concluding in 2014, the unnatural alliance all crumbled with the sunsets of Bumpers and Pryor and Clinton, and with the presence of a black Democratic president, the state couldn’t abide.

In four years, Arkansas Democrats went from being the default party in a no-party state to being a rejected and hapless nationalized party in a state gone madly Republican.

So that’s where we are today — confronting an Arkansas Democratic Party that is trying to fashion itself as an actual party, and an aggressively minority one, though it has had no practice and can rely on no local precedent.

New policy or political ideas in Arkansas, both of them, are on the Republican side, meaning the private-option form of Medicaid expansion and the use of a line-item scheme to save that Medicaid expansion. Democrats are on the sidelines, though sometimes they run on the field and have to be corralled by security and returned to the bench.

Lately I’ve been critical of the new, try-harder legislative Democrats on two accounts. One is that they decided in this fiscal session to play a touch of partisan politics by trying somehow to leverage their support for Medicaid expansion — only the most important policy of a generation and one they could not possibly oppose, and didn’t. The other is that they generally seem to be trying too hard as a minority legislative caucus to assert themselves procedurally and tactically, such as refusing for several days to allow passage of the constitutionally mandated appropriation for constitutional and fiscal agencies, as if that had anything to do with the Medicaid expansion issue they presumed to be leveraging somehow.

That was Washington-caliber silliness, which may not be the direction Arkansas Democrats want to go.

My advice is that Arkansas Democrats need to:

• Retrench around a few sound progressive principles.

• Let the political and legislative debate come to them.

• Apply those principles where advised.

• Avoid silly procedural games in the state Legislature.

• Hope for individual political talent.

By that I mean more specifically:

• Rallying around a young guy like state Rep. Clarke Tucker of Little Rock, who let the Medicaid expansion scheme come to him, at which time he fashioned a valuable amendment that made the Hutchinson administration’s clever scheme much sounder, and who has sponsored reasonable legislation to require disclosure of dark-money “electioneering” advertising.

• Going all-in for tax reform as best exemplified by the efforts of state Rep. Warwick Sabin of Little Rock to expand the idea — a Reaganesque one, actually — to grant earned-income tax credits to low-income working people as an encouragement to work instead of take welfare.

• Taking strong if currently unpopular and surely losing stands in opposition to the inevitable anti-woman and pro-discrimination proposals arising from Republican social conservatives who oppose even birth control. And these Republicans actually endorse — at great harm to the state’s business climate in the modern world — the anachronism of open discrimination against people according to the nature of their romantic attachments.

As I put it last week, Arkansans will achieve a new sanity at some point and Democrats need to be waiting for them when they do.

Just calmly do the right thing and see what happens — there’s a manifesto for you.

That ought to get a bit of a discussion going.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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