The patience of a Beebe

— When he strolled into the state House of Representatives in January 2007 to deliver his first State of the State address, Gov. Mike Beebe seemed to spot an especially friendly face.

Then he brushed his index finger along the side of his nose.

If you are as old as I am, surely you remember The Sting.

That signal is what Paul Newman and Robert Redford and the rest used in that classic movie to indicate that they were in on the deal, the operation, the scheme.

Their plot was bad, but good. They were scamming a guy. But it was a really bad guy.

The film is about hustlers and revenge, yes. But it’s also an engaging and whimsical ode to patience, smugness and cleverness, and to the end justifying the means.

So it is that a lot of people don’t so much like Beebe and his longtime sidekick, chief of staff Morril Harriman. It’s because Beebe and Harriman think they’re smarter than everyone else and freely act like it.

Indeed they’re plenty smart, but something else actually defines them more: They’re strategic and they’re patient and they’re smug. They’re willing to go along with unpleasant means-or at least idle along in a way that can be temporarily misapprehended-to achieve a desired end.

I’ve called them Jordan and Pippen. Others have called them Batman and Robin.

Maybe what we should call them is Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker.

Here’s an example: Early in the Medicaid expansion debate, Beebe asked the federal Health and Human Services Department to advise him formally whether a state could opt in to expansion, then opt out if it encountered the budgetary need to do so.

One day I mentioned to Beebe that this was a very fine question. He said he thought I was smarter than that. It’s an obvious question and the answer is plainly yes, of course, he said.

But it’ll help deflect opposition, he said, if we act like we need the feds to tell us so in a well-timed letter.

I’ll freely admit to not having Beebe’s and Harriman’s strategic patience. If I think state Sen. Jason Rapert of Bigelow is full of it, for example, I’ll tell him so to his face and head for a computer keyboard to write it for the next day’s newspaper.

Conversely, many people are wondering what’s up right now with all this niceness going on between Beebe, the centrist Democrat, and Rapert, the extreme showboat Republican right-winger.

Beebe has let Rapert become chief sponsor of the governor’s grocery-taxreduction bill. And Beebe has been saying that Rapert’s extreme anti-abortion bill-that fetal-heartbeat atrocity-is quite possibly unconstitutional, but not whether he opposes it.

I think I have a general idea what’s going on, not to suggest I’m worthy of a Sting salute.

I suspect Beebe is enamored of the idea of having his grocery-tax measure transcend the full political range. So he had Rapert sponsor it on the kook right and state Rep. Darrin Williams sponsor it in the House, not so much on the left (because there is no left wing in the Arkansas General Assembly), but on the most distant partisan Democratic flank.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Beebe hadn’t sized up Rapert as so needy for attention and glory that he thinks he might use this arrangement to extract some key vote or other concession later.

As a Democratic state senator said to me three days ago when I asked for his opinion on why Beebe would choose Rapert for the grocery-tax bill:“I don’t know. But I’m sure it will all be revealed to us in time.”

I asked Harriman again the other day why they picked that guy to sponsor that bill. “There are a lot of bills,” he said, and kept walking.

As for Rapert’s Senate Bill 134, the fetal-heartbeat bill that violates Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, I suspect Beebe has calculated as follows: There is no reason for him to oppose the measure philosophically, because that’s a clear and certain loser in popular opinion in Arkansas.

I theorize that he has determined that the only potentially effective way to handle the measure is to endure the wrath of a few emotional liberals while he proceeds in a patient and smug and clever way.

So he builds slowly the solid case that the measure is unconstitutional and would cost the state needless money for futile legal defense.

He may not stop the bill. But he would have taken his only viable strategic shot at redefining more favorably the popular view and the public debate.

I asked Beebe once about these kinds of tactics. He responded with an elaborate military metaphor about knowing when to charge and when to retreat and when to wait.

Maybe that’s why we was grinning as I was asking him agitatedly about his seeming alliance with Rapert.

I must not be as smart as him. I know I’m not as patient. I don’t want to wait to try to get the best of Jason Rapert. I want to do it at the earliest opportunity and every opportunity after that.

But in The Sting, the bad guy could never know that he’d been gotten by the schemers. That was the price of success.

What’s the satisfaction in that?

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

Editorial, Pages 17 on 02/07/2013

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