A maverick sits out

I was moderating a panel of state legislators last Wednesday and I kept trying to prod House Speaker Davy Carter into saying whether he would seek the Republican nomination for governor.

He wouldn’t budge. But then, all of a sudden, he did, essentially.

It happened near the end of our 90-minute program. I’d quit asking questions and turned the proceeding over to the audience at a rural legislative conference in Hot Springs.

Former state Sen. Jim Luker of Wynne, tragically term-limited progressive Democrat, rose to ask about something I’d deliberately skipped over. He brought up all those gun bills in the recent session.

I’d decided the most egregious had been summarily rejected or amended to near-pointlessness and that other issues were more important.

But Luker said he was troubled that the gun issue had devolved in Arkansas from a right to hunt into a pervasive “gun culture,” and he wanted the panel to answer for that.

There were six legislators on the panel. Luker did not direct his question to Carter, or to anyone in particular.

The speaker easily could have let others respond.

But we’re talking about Davy Carter, who’s “all mavericky,” as Tina Fey pretending to be Sarah Palin might say.

Carter demanded to be heard on the question. And he proceeded to say this gun obsession is madness.

Why, he said, he can’t imagine a state in which his wife and children would stand in a supermarket line next to a man openly carrying a gun and doing so legally.

He revealed that, during the session, he’d had to tell the State Police that somebody had sent him a picture of his home in the cross hairs.

That was after he’d said, oh, heavens, no, to an open-carry law.

And while he was at it, Carter put a lot of these abortion bills in the same category-that is, as matters more of right-wing grandstanding than serious legislating.

He stipulated: He’s for guns and against abortion.

But then he said as follows: If the Republican Party is going to mature into a permanent majority in Arkansas and remain competitive nationally, it’s going to have to cool it on this gun and abortion obsession and demonstrate that it can govern-as it otherwise demonstrated in Arkansas, actually, on the private option for health-insurance expansion.

Between every sentence, practically, Carter was finding it advisable or necessary to remark that he probably was going to regret what he was saying.

In other words, Carter was saying he was not running.

You don’t seek the gubernatorial nomination in gun-crazed, abortion-opposing Republican Arkansas by lecturing the voters concentrated in Northwest Arkansas who are going to decide the primary.

You do not run for the Republican nomination for governor by announcing that you are not nearly as rabid in defense of the Second Amendment and the zygote as the people who will vote in your primary are.

You don’t run for governor by volunteering to say incendiary things that you feel obliged to punctuate, though not disclaim, with predictions of future regret.

Two days later, Carter formally announced he was not running and would go back to banking.

Then he kept a speaking engagement at the Political Animals Club where he regaled the audience with a top-10 list making fun of his reputed moderation. He said he simply did not know if the Arkansas Republican Party would nominate a guy like him who wants to govern from the center out.

At that moment, Carter might well have been perfectly positioned to go all super-maverick and say, heck, he’d just run for governor as a Democrat.

He instantly would have been more competitive than he would have been on the Republican side.

And his main rival, Mike Ross, would have needed smelling salts.

Not to fear. Carter likes tax cuts for the rich too much to switch parties.

I think.

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.