I lit up social media last week by agreeing with Mayor Frank Scott that history would record Asa Hutchinson as a great governor.
Inspired by the level of interest and agitation, I re-ignited Twitter and Facebook by presuming to rank the quality of Arkansas governorships during my lifetime, from 1954 on. I generously call that the modern era.
These 10 governors are ranked in terms of accomplishment, competence, efficiency and legacy, without regard to whether I agree ideologically.
I needn't like all that a governor is doing to recognize his accomplishment, competence, efficiency and influence.
This analysis is based on a broad theme that values moderation of our state's once-reactionary politics and modernization of our state's lagging economy.
If a governorship advances those aims, it's redeemable in my book. If it damages them, it isn't.
So, here they are, from best to worst:
- Winthrop Rockefeller, liberal Republican, 1967-71. He got next to nothing accomplished legislatively. As a governor for tomorrow, he struggled with a Democratic Legislature of yesterday. But what he did manage to achieve substantively--a Freedom of Information law--was the modernizing foundation of everything else. What he accomplished more broadly merely changed the very essence of the state, from backward-reveling to forward-seeking. He forced Democrats to come up with candidates better than Old Guard segregationists and machine-politics Faubusites. Speaking of that ...
- Dale Bumpers, liberal Democrat, 1971-75--A charismatic and eloquent country lawyer with a Northwestern University education, he offered moderating and modernizing themes and passed what the Legislature had denied Rockefeller. He raised income taxes, reorganized an absurdly diffuse government, set up community colleges, pushed for free textbooks and, with his wife, championed statewide childhood immunizations.
- Mike Beebe, moderate to conservative Democrat, 2007-2015--He drew down the regressive grocery tax. He implausibly got an overwhelmingly Republican Legislature to embrace Medicaid expansion, which served medical providers, the working poor and the state budget. But his general strength was being smart. It occurred to him that he could mobilize Democratic legislators to deny the House speakership to a right-wing Republican and deliver it to a moderate Republican, Davy Carter, basically a Beebe Democrat. Without that smooth move, the state probably wouldn't ever have passed Medicaid expansion.
- Asa Hutchinson, Republican, 2015-present--We also wouldn't have Medicaid expansion if he hadn't taken ownership of it and managed arduously and adroitly to keep it alive. On one occasion, he put a line in the Medicaid expansion appropriation ending the program so that he could get the requisite 27th Senate vote, and then line-item-vetoed that line, as he had told the 27th voter he would. He has Republicanized state government while continuing the theme of modernizing and, at times, moderating. He's cut taxes, but cautiously. He's talked down right-wingers who wanted bathroom bills, not because he's a big fan of transgender persons, but because of the message such legislation would send to national and international economic prospects who might help modernize our economy. I almost ranked him above Beebe because Beebe bungled the Buffalo River and Asa is having to spend millions to fix that.
- Bill Clinton, Democrat, 1979-81 and from 1983 to December 1992--His governorship was mostly devoted to finesses of his liberalism in a conservative state to maintain political viability with which to run for president. But he improved education and emphasized economic development, thus advancing moderation and modernization. Mainly, though, he artfully dodged his way politically through an Arkansas minefield and became a better president than governor.
- Mike Huckabee, Republican, July 1996-2007--He was a right-winger by rhetoric, bored by policy and an entertainer by nature and preference. Despite that, he extended the modernizing and moderating era. He embraced ARKids First, won limited school consolidation and acquiesced to legislative leadership in passage of a record sales-tax increase for education. The best thing he did was stand down for the Democratic legislative leadership of people like Beebe, for a while, and the late Jim Argue.
- David Pryor, liberal Democrat, 1975-1979--He's the finest human being in the group, better as a U.S. senator than governor and beloved as a noble elder statesman. But his governorship was largely caretaking. It also was marred by his unfortunate flirtation with odd home-rule theories that the Legislature, of all bodies, saved the state from.
- Jim Guy Tucker, moderate Democrat, December 1992-July 1996--He shored up Medicaid and didn't deserve the fate of getting sideswiped by the Clinton special prosecutor. But that stunt he pulled--retracting his resignation and making Arkansas a banana republic for an afternoon--besmirched the legacy.
- Frank White, Republican, 1981-83--He's not last because even the debacle of a creation-science law wasn't as bad as international disgrace at Central High. Speaking of that ...
- Orval Faubus, conservative Democrat, 1955-1967--His tragic governorship is what all the modernizing and moderating has endeavored to overcome.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/21/2019