Americans for Prosperity adds insult to injury

— Have you seen that television commercial about how Arkansas once was swell but now is not?

It would be fair and accurate only if it were referring to football.

But it’s presuming to assess our quality of life, which supposedly was so much better when we were poorer and more bigoted and less educated. Glory days, those were.

Today we in Arkansas are overtaxed and losing jobs and drowning in debt, the commercial alleges.

This contrived and patently absurd affront is paid for by Americans for Prosperity. That’s an arch-conservative outfit believing in private wealth, despising government at all levels and founded by those reactionary rightwing brothers, David and Charles Koch. They are the multi-billionaire owners of a multi-national conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., that is the second-largest privately held corporation in the country.

Here is what has happened, in a simple sequential explanation:

  1. The Kochs and their agents saw Arkansas, owing to its tragic antipathy toward Barack Obama and its smallness, as ripe for the inexpensive taking by right-wingers.

  2. They intended to back Tea Partyish Republicans who would seize control of the state Legislature and cut income taxes on rich people, reduce services to poor people, eliminate regulations and destroy traditional public education by lifting any restriction on charter schools or impediments thereto.

  3. But then Arkansas Democrats got smart and decided to fight back by saying they were Mike Beebe Democrats, not Obama Democrats.

  4. So then the Koch brothers and their agents decided they needed to re-calibrate, though not with any inevitably boomeranging personal attack on the popular governor.

  5. The Kochs and their agents chose the softer, subtler message that the state is a wasteland of lost greatness. They chose to foment a wrongtrack sentiment, not an anti-Beebe one, as such.

Beebe tells me he saw the commercial moments before leaving the house Monday night to speak at the Peabody Hotel at an awards function for Arkansas businesses.

So he decided to go off on it.

“When they’re trashing Arkansas, they’re trashing you,” he said to the 400 or so in the business crowd.

It’s not about me, but all of us, and it’s completely wrong, he said.

Arkansas has cut taxes by a cumulative net $730 million since he’s been governor, he said. It has added a net 27,000 jobs since the height of the recession, he contended, adding that the recession was “caused by Wall Street and people outside the state that we had no control over.”

And, he pointed out, a reputable national education group just ranked Arkansas fifth in the country on a compilation of factors determining education quality.

Debt? Beebe says that all he can figure is that the commercial must be referring to the highway bond program—borrowing against future federal turnback for interstate and federal highway maintenance and improvement—that a robust 81 percent of the voters supported in a special election.

Beebe was still going when I got him on the phone the next afternoon.

In addition to all that, he told me, Arkansas has netted good reviews in the New York Times for nationally innovative attempts to reform Medicaid spending, which, Beebe hastened to say, “has nothing to do with Obamacare.”

So let me tell you what conceivably could happen.

I’m reminded of a news conference called in 1984 by then-U.S. Sen. David Pryor to brandish a headline from a Texas newspaper about that state maybe getting its parched paws on bountiful water from Arkansas.

Pryor came out four-square for saving our water from greedy outsiders. He didn’t actually say that his Republican opponent, Ed Bethune, was in league with the Texas water thieves. It didn’t matter. Pryor was the lone defender of the state against those who would harm or disparage it.

If Beebe were inclined, and I think he almost is, he could hit the stump to defend our collective honor against this libel by filthy-rich people from out of state trying to buy us on a discount to elect their Republican puppets to our Legislature and destroy our schools and regulations and services.

There isn’t much a Democrat could win in Arkansas right now. In fact, I can think of only one potential scenario.

It is this one: A Democrat named Beebe might be able to defeat facelessly evil industrialists from out of state who have lied about us in a television commercial on our own local stations.

Beware of our hypersensitivity. We’re liable to jump up and bite you with it.

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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected] and read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.

Editorial, Pages 15 on 09/27/2012

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