JOHN BRUMMETT: The kid's all right

Once I was speaking in Conway at a roast of former state Sen. Gilbert Baker, at the time my favorite Republican, a designation I always try to keep in my collection.

Ed Bethune, then Frank White, then David Bisbee, then Baker and then today's column subject, Michael Lamoureux--those are the members of the Favorite Republican Club.

There were hundreds of Republicans between me and the getaway door at the roast that night, so I turned early from roasting to toasting.

I explained that I liked a legislative process that worked by compromise and accommodation toward practical solutions based on mutual regard and trust regardless of partisan posturing. I referred to a hangup in a recently completed fiscal legislative session and said that Baker and I could have gone to Starbucks, his favorite place, and worked it out in 10 minutes.

I happened to look down at the table front and center and saw Lamoureux, a Baker disciple, nodding his head.

A new prospect for the Favorite Republican Club had been revealed to me.


I know what you're thinking: I need to insert here that Baker went on to get too big for his britches and is implicated in a matter under federal investigation that has to do with money raised from a nursing-home mogul for a judge who reduced a jury verdict against one of the mogul's facilities.

And Lamoureux, as a legislator, let his mentor Baker find him an easy consulting retainer from a religious-right outfit, one fairly clear in its conflict with public duty and thus its inappropriateness.

So there's that. Good people messing up--it's not unheard of. It's not to be excused. But a pre-existing personal regard can prevail through it.

Lamoureux has left his mark--first as a 20-something Republican state representative helping to pave the way for the coming GOP takeover, then as state senator, then as president pro tem of the state Senate, during which he, in typically beleaguered, woe-is-me style, shepherded the private option to precarious passage.

Through it all, Lamoureux was a vaguely conservative pragmatist, liked by Democrats and more interested in getting something done than spouting conservative rhetoric.

State Sen. David Sanders has told me about his days as a right-wing newspaper columnist when he would engage Lamoureux in conversation about some supposedly vital Republican conservative principle. He said Lamoureux once told him he was simply incapable of being as sure and passionate about such policy dogma. "David, I'm just not as good a conservative as you," Lamoureux remembers telling Sanders.

So then this happened: Asa Hutchinson got elected the Republican governor and inherited immediate high hurdles that had to be cleared before he could hope to settle into a more orderly and self-defined term.

Hutchinson had to get the private option passed to keep hospitals open and generate money for tax cuts. And he had to do something to relieve the Highway Commission from a cash-flow squeeze that was leaving federal matching money on the table for needed work in a state that loves the roads that its pickups require.

So Asa nabbed Lamoureux to leave the Senate and become his chief of staff to apply his legislative relations and skills to negotiating the early high hurdles.

The work is now done, having been accomplished with full success. We have the private option. We have happy hospitals. We have a solid budget and tax cuts. We have a highway program.

The governor can take a breath and Lamoureux can take off. He already has taken off, in fact, effective last Friday.

He's flown to Washington to become a partner in a new congressional lobbying firm with the controversial high-dollar class-action lawyer, John Goodson of Texarkana. Lamoureux's family will follow when he finds suitable quarters.

As it happens, Lamoureux, for all his stylistic differences with the more agitatedly conservative U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, is maybe Cotton's best friend. They matched up as competing basketball postmen back in the day, the heavier Lamoureux for the Russellville Cyclones and the stringier but more intense Cotton for the Dardanelle Sand Lizards.

But Lamoureux insists he's not going to Washington to exploit his relationship with Cotton, "because that never works and is not fair to anybody."

That's not to say Cotton can't or won't introduce him to someone.

Lamoureux's skills seem to be more broad than that, at least in the Arkansas arena.

Consider: He's best friends with Cotton and now will be the business partner of Goodson, and I count myself as a friend and admirer of Lamoureux even though I've written more critically about Cotton than just about anybody, unless it would be Goodson, unless it would be Goodson's wife, Courtney.

But Lam's all right, no matter who his other pals are. And the ship of the state is steadier for his having been here.

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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 05/31/2016

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