Arkansas on the contrary

LITTLE ROCK — Indulge me, please, as I quote my lead paragraph from the onlineonly column Wednesday that many beloved print loyalists never see.

It went like this: “So there you have it: Arkansas goes Republican just in time for the Republicans to collapse nationally.”

Ever out of sync, this Arkansas.

There is but one consistent truth about Arkansas politics. It is that it will seldom, if ever, have anything to do with national politics.

That was true when Arkansas stayed Democratic both through the Reagan Revolution and the reddening of the rest of Dixie.

And it is true now as it bestows historic first-time might on its longdormant Republican Party. It does so at the very moment that the national Republican Party founders with declining relevance.

It’s a cultural story and cultural contradiction.

President Barack Obama won re-election Tuesday by forging and holding a growing national coalition of blacks, non-Cuban Hispanics, other minorities, women, young people, gays and lesbians and Upper Midwest working-class people who appreciate that an activist government saved their auto-industry jobs.

It is a coalition that, if kept together, will become stronger with demographic trends increasing minority populations and turning white people into a minority.

Thus the modern-day Republican Party is increasingly on the wrong side of the numbers, of the culture, of history.

This is still your father’s Republican Party. That’s the point.

The GOP has now lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. And its future doesn’t look brighter, but dimmer.

If you can’t win with mainly white folks in 2012, then how are you going to win with fewer white folks—as a percentage of the voting population—in 2016, 2020 and beyond?

But forget all that in Arkansas.

We remain a static culture with fewer black votes than other Dixie states and a Hispanic population that is growing, but not to the extent that it grows elsewhere.

So while Republicans limp along nationally with white majorities that lose muscle, Arkansas Republicans soar to historic new heights with white majorities they have co-opted and that still rule.

You want to hear the most ironic thing?

It’s that it actually helps the Arkansas Republican revolution that Obama was re-elected.

That way, this oddly feared president will remain in office in 2014, dragging down every Democrat in the state, including those like Attorney General Dustin McDaniel who want to become governor.

What I’m saying—and what all those in the know are saying—is that the “R” will maintain its new Arkansas magic as long as this president stays in office to do mildly centerleft things and keep a high majority of Arkansas white folks agitated irrationally against him.

Lt. Gov. Mark Darr posted Tuesday night that, after 2014, Republicans would occupy all seven state constitutional offices.

I’m not prepared to argue.

While we’re on the subject of strangely contradictory politics in Arkansas, we should take note that Republicans swept into office promising not to raise taxes while, at the same time, voters were passing a constitutional amendment to raise their own sales taxes for highways.

A couple of Republicans lost primaries merely because they voted to give the people that choice.

I guess it’s that old cussed Arkansas independence by which Bubba says, “If there are any taxes to be raised around here, I’ll do it myself.”

Finally, let us officially record the growing disconnection between Pulaski County and the rest of the state, indeed its suburban abutters.

Nigh unto a fourth of Obama’s Arkansas vote came from Pulaski County alone, which he carried overwhelmingly, 87,055 to 68,856.

But he dare not drive across any county line. In Saline County, he got drubbed, 12,868 to 32,962.

That’s white flight of interplanetary proportions.

They probably ought to set up a passport checkpoint at County Line Road near Alexander.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.