When Davy Carter, the Cabot Republican and speaker-elect in the Arkansas House of Representatives, came to Springdale Thursday to visit with locals, many in audience eyed him much like Tyson Foods eyes chickens.

The group of mostly GOP faithful turned a meet-and-greet for the fi rst Republican speakerto-be since Reconstruction into a meet-and-beat. It may as well have been Jimmy Carter standing before them at Neal’s Cafe.

The former Democratic president probably would have gotten a warmer reception.

It’s amazing Carter even had a reason to travel into the Republican stronghold, a description that could apply to Neal’s Cafe or Springdale. Take your pick. He wasn’t supposed to be speaker of the House at all.

Carter earned the post in a last-minute maneuver.

A bunch of Democrats - urged on by Democratic leader Greg Leding of Fayetteville - joined some Republicans to put Carter in charge. Most had expected Waldron’s Terry Rice to get the post with the backing of most Republicans. The GOP tsunami the party expected in the November electionturned into more of a high tide and set the stage for the coup of compromise.

After Carter’s election, he further rankled the faithful by hiring a major Democratic operative - a friend from Cabot - as his chief of staft and kept former Democratic lawmaker Bill Stovall on the legislative staft . Stovall is about as close as it comes to institutional knowledge in a Legislature heavily infl uenced by term limits.

Republicans at Neal’s Cafe smelled fresh meat, and it wasn’t just what was cooking in the cafe’s kitchen. They were appalled Carter had the audacity to intermarry, so to speak, with those people, the ones from the other persuasion.

Perhaps the hard-core conservatives should be forgiven for their heavy handed treatment of the speaker-elect. They were certain November 2012 was when Obama would be swept from off ce. They thought the U.S. Senate andHouse would both be theirs. They thought control of the Arkansas Legislature was finally going to be in the right hands. Voters across the state gave them some victories, but not a mandate to ram ultra-conservatism down the state’s throat.

Rather than seeing Thursday’s meeting as an opportunity to work with the new speaker, they handed him a bag of coal for Christmas

Davy Carter’s birth as House leader was conceived in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation. The assembly at Neal’s did not receive the king they had anticipated and decided to treat Carter’s ascension as an unholy alliance rather than good tidings of joy.

We’ve certainly heard of crossover appointments in politics. Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, still serves as Obama’s secretary of transportation.

Robert Gates was a Republican at the helm of the Department of Defense during the early years of ObamaNation.

President George W.

Bush had a Democratic transportation secretary in Norman Mineta. Bill Clinton had Republican William Cohen in charge at the Department of Defense.

Believe it or not, William Bennett was a Democrat when Ronald Reagan fi rstappointed him to head the National Endowment for the Humanities and remained so when Reagan appointed him secretary of education in 1985. He later became a Republican and has carried the water - or must it be Kool-Aid? - for conservative thinking ever since.

If one can develop relationships of trust, having someone of a dift erent mindset around is a sign (1) that you’re comfortable enough with your convictions that the presence of other ideas aren’t threatening and (2) you appreciate understanding where the “other side” is coming from, even if you don’t subscribe to the same playbook as they do.

Knowing one’s opponent - and I’m not sure that’s a fair way to characterize lawmakers of dift erent parties in Arkansas - is a major step toward fi guring out how to manage what must be a collaborative process of give-and-take.

Arkansas needs that and will get it with people of character from both parties.

It’s pretty darn easy to be intractable sitting around a table at a local cafe. But if the lawmakers in Little Rock take that approach, the state’s goose is cooked.

GREG HARTON IS OPINION PAGE EDITOR OF NWA MEDIA.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 12/17/2012