OPINION

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: At least an inroad

They can't seem to find any in Washington. Those who seek it tend to get ridiculed and demonized. They get called unprincipled sellouts to the dark side.

You don't encounter much of it on social media, where strident, angry and unaccountable intolerance of differing opinions dominates.

And it appears to be shrinking in Arkansas, where the current state of politics tends to fall out this way: 60 percent for Donald Trump and the resentment he represents, 35 percent aghast at Trump and those resentments, and 5 percent out to lunch.

I refer to common ground. More specifically, I refer to Common Ground Arkansas, a 501(c)4 nonprofit set up by state Sen. Jim Hendren soon after he abandoned the Republican Party, on account of its divisiveness and meanness, and became an independent.

The organization recently announced its board. It's a stellar group. It consists, among others, of retired Tyson Foods executive vice president Archie Schaffer, former Republican House Speaker Davy Carter, former centrist Democratic state representative and retired Army Reserve brigadier general LeAnne Burch, bank president Sam Sicard, Fort Smith Mayor George McGill, Lonoke County farmer Mark Isbell and Walmart associate counsel for litigation Veronica Gromada.

Its impressiveness is in a corporate context and in terms of professional prominence and diversity. But, in the current political environment, the group seems susceptible to Trumpian resentment as fully establishmentarian. It seems easily and unfairly dismissible as "Republicans in Name Only" or "liberals in disguise" or "deep state" or whatever else the raging faux-populist brigade spews to dismiss persons of civic leadership, political moderation and professional accomplishment and stature.

The participation of leading Walmart and Tyson officials might have been a clear advantage in Arkansas politics until about, oh, 2021. That's when those corporate titans advocated during the legislative session a hate-crimes bill that got watered down beyond recognition. They also opposed bad-reputation legislation imposing discrimination against transgender persons, which passed with solid majorities.

In Arkansas today, we need to divorce the words "successful" and "influential." Success has become so tainted that the greater influence accrues to those who resent it.

Common Ground's themes, splashed tastefully on its website, seem wholly unassailable. They are "ideas over ideology, people over politics [and] Arkansas over ambition." The organization's stated intentions are similarly beyond reproach. They are to "support problem-solving candidates loyal to Arkansans, work toward Arkansas-first legislation that addresses the problems we face [and] increase voter choice at the ballot box."

Its strategic first priority seems to be supporting solution-oriented candidates for the state Legislature and state constitutional offices to try to change the culture of divisive right-wing extremism.

Common Ground seems almost identical on the state level to the national No Labels movement, which seems to be accomplishing nothing amid congressional polarization. But that's with an exception, conceivably a big one: There are perhaps a dozen senators of both parties, and a couple dozen representatives of both parties--all affiliated with No Labels--who have been meeting regularly on an infrastructure deal during the now-abandoned infrastructure negotiations between President Biden and GOP U.S. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. If a logical infrastructure bill is to emerge, it probably could do so only as an outgrowth of the center-leveraging of those quiet No Labels-related efforts.

We're talking about senators on the Democratic side like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and, on the Republican side, Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski.

All four are reviled by the bases of their own parties. Government by the base-reviled. That's a good motto.

Last week, Hendren and Common Ground's capable top hired hand, Misty Orpin, darted around the state on what they called a "listening tour." The purpose seems to have been to meet with local people to explain the problem-solving concept and encourage those people to think about and come up with local candidates fitting the model.

These candidates might be independents. They might be center-inclined Republicans, like Asa Hutchinson. They probably won't be Democrats because the "D" is toxic everywhere except basically Little Rock and Fayetteville, where it's as golden as the "R" has been everywhere else.

Another part of Common Ground's strategy seems to be the creation of a statewide network of responsible local people committed to solving real problems rather than waging a culture war. The idea is that Republican legislators afraid to vote against the most extreme right-wing measures might someday look to the House and Senate galleries and see not only a menacing NRA lobbyist but good folks from home who were interested in real back-home problems and real legislative solutions, and disdainful of distraction.

And we're probably going to hear soon from Common Ground that the greater failing of the current Legislature is not culture-war extremism, but legislative power grabs that real conservatives and real populists should abhor.

So far, Common Ground doesn't strike me as something making a big splash, though I can hope. An inroad here and there might have to suffice, and would be welcomed.


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.

Upcoming Events