They had an overflow crowd Thursday night for the meeting of the Pulaski County Democratic Party. They ran out of forms to sign up new members.
Fear is a great motivator. Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions--they indeed are worthy of fear, presuming to mount an American revolution based on Trump's getting 1.5 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.
Political activism is a good thing. I am loath to minimize it. But minimize it I must in regard to this one-night uptick in organized Democratic activity in Little Rock.
Pulaski County isn't the Democrats' problem. They carry it consistently. Everywhere else in Arkansas except Fayetteville and a few heavily black Delta counties--that's the problem.
And political parties have never exercised the least influence in Arkansas. For decades Arkansas was a one-party Democratic state in a nominal sense only, dominated by personalities like Bumpers, Pryor and Clinton. It operated in what was essentially a no-party culture in which local legislators ran as Democrats on a tide of inertia.
Then white rural conservative Arkansans recoiled against Barack Obama. They nationalized their political identification, which had nothing to do with the state Republican Party. But it made them as solidly Republican as they had been Democratic--more, really, because the new Republicanism is ideological rather than contingent on personal popularity.
Vince Insalaco, the ever-earnest state Democratic Party chairman, got up in front of the assembly Thursday night and basically said--as he related his remarks to me later--woe is us.
He outlined 17 principles the party believes in. One is a woman's right to choose. Another is equal rights regardless of sexual orientation or identity. A third is sensible gun laws.
What that means is that Arkansas Democrats are alienated from rural church-goers and hunters and concealed gun-carriers. They will get only the black vote, the gay vote, the environmentalist vote and the generic liberal vote. It comes to between 35 and 40 percent.
Hillary Clinton didn't even get that much, but 34 percent. Insalaco said there's not much he and the party can do when national issues get blasted from the megaphone and your national standard-bearer gets but 34 percent.
Insalaco lamented that a stellar Democratic legislative candidate in Maumelle put up the family values of his 40-year marriage against a Republican incumbent who'd gotten caught on the Ashley Madison website. The Democratic candidate knocked on 5,000 doors, Insalaco said. And the Republican who'd navigated the Ashley Madison extramarital website won easily.
"Our challenge is to do something that's never been done in Arkansas," meaning to build a political party that could influence a political outcome, Insalaco said.
He's an emotional man who pours his heart into whatever he does. Through no fault of his own, his heroic labors have coincided with the demise of the party he leads. All he's ever known to do to raise money is bring in his old pals--Bill and Hillary Clinton--to speak at fundraisers. And now Bill and Hillary probably have as little desire to come to Arkansas to give another talk as Arkansans have to sit through one.
The Clinton Era in Arkansas was over well before Nov. 8, when it got stomped flat.
Insalaco tells me he will ponder through the Thanksgiving holiday whether to seek another term as chairman next year, but is inclined to do so. Meantime, a new-generation leader has nominated himself.
State Rep. Michael John Gray is a 40-year-old farmer in Augusta who has a law degree and is the current leader of the House Democratic caucus, now down to 26 members. He tells me he has decided to run for chairman because the party must "retool" and "reconnect."
Gray seems the right kind of new leader considering that he is young and from rural environs.
The question is how he, or anyone, could possibly retool and reconnect a party that historically has amounted to nothing and now is an alien island in a land that may as well have been annexed by Kansas.
What's Gray to do--replace Insalaco's 17 principles with a couple of tactics?
Gray tells me he wants the party to adhere to those principles but listen to Arkansas voters, rather than lament them, and design economic policies to address their needs. He mentioned that Mike Beebe connected with working people by his birth in a tar-paper shack and by phasing down the sales tax on groceries. Gray mentioned former U.S. Rep. Marion Berry coming up through the city council, learning politics close to the people.
In the end, the way back for Arkansas Democrats will be hard and slow. It's to espouse strong and clear beliefs and try to persuade stubborn voters in a static culture of the rightness of those beliefs.
But, yes, it would help if those beliefs and attempted persuasions were as much economic and small-town as social and cultural and urban.
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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 11/22/2016