Let's focus today on something that doesn't matter.
The Arkansas Democratic Party's state committee met a week and a half ago in North Little Rock. The assembly descended into a procedural morass. It engaged in screeching fiddling after the state had burned.
It validated two old maxims: The smaller the stakes, the more bitter the fight; and the lesser the consequence, the greater the distorted sense of importance.
Here in a paragraph, albeit a long one, is what the Arkansas Democrats spent the morning yakking about:
The party has new rules adopted last year that create four-year officer terms. That means that the current chairman, Vince Insalaco, who has said he won't run again, could serve until early 2019. But the party thought it also had adopted a transition plan to provide for an election of a new chairman in the coming February, when state Rep. Michael John Gray intended to be running to succeed Insalaco. But a review revealed that the transition plan never actually got voted on. By the rules, Insalaco may stay on until 2019 if he wants. They had a vote essentially about whether to abide by the passed rules or the un-passed transition plan. It amounted to a vote either of liking and defending Insalaco or disliking and blaming Insalaco. It came out 52-43 to like and defend Insalaco, who said afterward that he might choose to make his resignation effective sometime in the next six months and permit a special election.
Allow me to quantify the number of people who don't care about any of that. What you do is take the population of the world. Then you subtract those 95 people who voted. And I'm not sure about all of them. And there you have the number of people who don't care about any of that.
Political party organizations have never accomplished anything in Arkansas and aren't going to start now.
The state's longtime control by nominal Democrats was not remotely a matter of party activism, but the antithesis. It was a matter of conservative independent voters identifying as Democrats by inertia and favoring talented politicians and appealing personalities like Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, Bill Clinton and Mike Beebe.
When the Republicans lucked into a talented political and appealing personality of their own nominal affiliation--I mean Mike Huckabee--they could sneak in a governorship that was not remotely a product of party initiative and did nothing to build a party.
The real political parties in Arkansas were individual campaign mailing lists--Clinton's, Bumpers', Pryor's, Huckabee's.
Then the rocketing emergence of Republican control since 2010 had nothing to do with the state Republican Party or chairman Doyle Webb, who, I'm fairly sure, will admit as much.
Republicans took over Arkansas because national Democrats elected Barack Obama, and Arkansas didn't like him, for whatever reasons, and the state's white rural conservative voters went against Obama, which meant they went with nominal Republicanism.
Insalaco can remain state Democratic chairman for a few more weeks or two more years. Gray or someone else can take over sooner or later. And it won't make a darn until a talented politician comes along calling himself a Democrat and connecting individually with white rural conservative voters, or until the state makes generational, cultural and attitudinal changes that will take ... well, generational changes by definition require at least a generation.
Absent that, the Democratic State Committee can put out rules and more rules, and transition plans and more transition plans, and engage in steady streams of self-important discussions about procedural esoterica ... and none of it will amount to a thing.
May I be candid? Will you not get mad at the messenger? Oh, go ahead. I'm used to it.
Here's the candor: The Democratic Party in Arkansas is bravely associated right now with what's progressive and right--meaning seismic cultural change championing rights for gays, lesbians and transgender persons. But that brave and right championing is a political disconnector with the state's still-decisive white rural conservative voters who liked a liberal Democrat if he was a good talker and an economic populist.
But they don't much like a party that seems nowadays mostly to be about letting the gays marry or the transgender persons go into public restrooms for which their parts don't match the sign.
If you are going to be brave and right in a way that's ahead of your constituency--on the right side of history, as they say, and as the Arkansas Democrats are--then you are going to lose elections until your constituency evolves to catch up with you, perhaps aided by a talented politician who can finesse the matter.
Ironically, the best hope for more Democratic votes in Arkansas may be for Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson to succeed in his obsession to modernize the state's economy through better computer education and dogged pursuit of international business.
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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 12/27/2016