Punishing the Clintons

From the beginning, Little Rock's reliance on the Clintons for its brand seemed needy, superficial and even perilous.

A city must be more than shamelessness in clinging to a couple of famous people who passed through on the way up.

In the presidential campaign of 1992, Little Rock's leadership insisted that Bill Clinton's performance carried the city's future in the balance. The local conventional wisdom held that it would be a boon for Little Rock if he won the presidency and a serious community downer if he didn't.

I remember writing that the presidency itself might be a more important consideration.


When Clinton got caught doing that thing with that girl and then lying about it, the Little Rock lamentation was not for president, nor for the girl, nor for lost truth, but for Little Rock.

If he is disgraced, Little Rock's leadership feared, then the presidential library he was to put here would be less of a community-enhancement engine.

Then when Clinton seemed rehabilitated and the library and presidential center were formally opened, Little Rock's political and civic leadership proclaimed that the facility would serve as a tourist destination and economic boon.

That was despite the fact that no evidence existed that people were flocking for their vacations to Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, Mich., for Gerald Ford's presidential library and museum, or to Independence, Mo., for Harry Truman's, or even to Springfield, Ill., for Honest Abe's.

But this would be different, or so it was locally theorized, because of the high cross-country visibility of the center, the star quality of the still-vibrant former president and the continued political relevance of the power couple as evidenced by Bill's burgeoning international statesmanship and Hillary's service as secretary of state and likely future run of her own for president.

In a much larger, more-mature and truer urban center--Dallas--the placement of George W. Bush's presidential library on the local campus of Southern Methodist University was no big deal. It was SMU's business, mainly.

We drove to Dallas this year to stay in the uptown area within walking distance of the American Airlines Center where we would attend a Bruce Springsteen concert. We missed our exit, which can happen. The next exit, or maybe it was a freeway sign, promoted George W.'s library just ahead at SMU.

We pondered: "Maybe we could go there on the way out of town tomorrow if, that is, we're not too tired--and since it turns out we're in the neighborhood. But, mainly, let's turn around at the next exit and get ready to rock 'n' roll."

What was incidental in Dallas, an afterthought, was the full brand for Little Rock.

Even in Northwest Arkansas, where the Walton brand rules, the community affiliation is not dependent on one or two persons or politics, but on a corporate empire and the finest collection of world-class art outside the coasts and maybe Chicago. It's about the business and the art, not personalities.

So it came to pass a few years after the presidential center opened that the Little Rock Airport Commission--which is where all city establishment insiders go to semi-retire--decided to rename the local regional feeder airport the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.

Here a Clinton, there a Clinton, everywhere a Clinton, Clinton--except for the Clintons, who live in New York.

It was all good for Little Rock. But it was never altogether real, hitching your city's brand not to the city itself, but to a couple of still-active non-residents.

So now the Clintons are getting on in years and shop-worn.

If recent election returns are to be believed, they are aliens in a conservatively remade Arkansas where Hillary, as the Democratic candidate for president, fell decimal points shy of 34 percent.

Little Rock might as well rename itself Barack City in honor of a Democratic presidential candidate who could get all the way to 39 percent--then 37--in Arkansas.

All of that is context for the typical grandstand stunt pulled last week by state Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway. He brought up the prospect of a state law taking the Clinton name off this "gateway to Arkansas," which is what he calls the Little Rock airport.

It is typically ironic of right-wingers to profess to oppose big centralized government and yet seek to impose their values top-down to others--in this case a community that, in a truly conservative and decentralized world, would be blithely conceded the independent local authority to name its own danged airport whatever it pleased.

For the record: Hillary carried Pulaski County handsomely.

But Rapert has a political instinct for knowing when and where to perform for the conservative grandstand. The standing-room-only crowd proves irresistible to him.

Now is that time, and Little Rock the place, if one is itching to exploit damage to the Clinton brand--to pile on--and punish anyone precariously hitched to it.

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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.

Editorial on 12/04/2016

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