After Martha Shoffner as state treasurer, Republicans would be a big improvement.
I refer to these low-level state constitutional offices with purely custodial responsibilities requiring only basic competence and integrity.
Until our most recent elections, these offices — treasurer, auditor, land commissioner, secretary of state and lieutenant governor — provided convenient places for good ol’ boy or good ol’ girl Democrats to hang around.
Capitol-loitering Democrats long played musical chairs with these positions, plumping their retirement funds, avoiding productivity measurements and nabbing taxpayer-provided Tahoes.
It’s all been unseemly. And that was that long before Shoffner transcended unseemliness to sink to her own personal depths of stupidity and crassness and brazen corruption.
For years I’ve been writing that we need fewer Republicans in Washington and more in Little Rock. For years I’ve decried the nonsense of electing people to antiquated constitutional offices simply because they have “Ds” by their familiar-sounding names.
Speaking of familiar-sounding names, Charlie Daniels was a not-particularly esteemed state labor director for Democratic governors in the ’70s and ’80s.
When that ended, he used the popularity of his name and the “D” of his ballot identifier to win the goofy constitutional office of land commissioner. His job was to hire a few clerks to keep files of tax-delinquent real property.
He parlayed that record-keeping post to an upstairs move to secretary of state, a more extensive janitorial and record-keeping post. Here he had to hire people to cut the grass and shine the marble and put up Christmas decorations.
Then he parlayed that into an across-the-hall move to auditor, which, by the way, doesn’t audit diddly. It writes checks and, once a year, does make-work with a treasure hunt by which it advertises unclaimed property.
Charlie dispatched his duties adequately because there was nothing to them.
But now he has made the right decision to retire. It happens that the political ground has shaken beneath him. The Republicans have arrived. The leading prospective candidate for the vacancy at auditor is state Rep. Andrea Lea of Russellville, a Republican.
Republicans in the Legislature can hurt us, and do, with bad bills. But these minor constitutional offices aren’t policy jobs. Republicans taking over these clerical and administrative positions could bring actual qualification, competence and integrity to simple administrative performance.
For example: More than a decade ago, on the Friday before a general election in 2002, a young man named Randy Bynum walked into my office. He said a couple of Republicans had advised him on a long-shot to come see me. He didn’t have any campaign money and no one was paying attention to his race.
I did not know who he was.
It turned out he was the Republican nominee for state treasurer against Gus Wingfield, a good ol’ boy Democrat from Delight who had been term-limited as a state legislator and had ridden inertia to the auditor’s office.
Term-limited there, Gus had hopped back aboard the inertia train to try the treasurer thing down the second-floor hallway.
Bynum was a lawyer, certified public accountant and family businessman. He spoke of the need for professional experience and competence in the treasurer’s constitutionally dictated management and investment of state deposits.
Indeed, those treasurer’s duties, while administrative and ostensibly simple, are the most important of any of these minor constitutional offices.
If it was money she wanted, Shoffner held the right minor constitutional office. It was the only one that had hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to move around for investment — a process that, done properly and fairly and professionally, would be executed by established procedure that removed human discretion.
So I wrote an endorsement of Bynum that weekend. Surely unrelated to that, he got 43 percent of the vote, at that time the best share any Republican had won in years against Democratic good ol’ boy inertia for one of these low constitutional offices.
Wingfield went on to distinguish himself as treasurer by putting his two daughters in choice spots on the payroll.
He opted to leave the office in 2006, whereupon a nondescript and inconsequential term-limited state legislator of a nominally Democratic label — I refer to Martha Shoffner of Newport — looked around for a vacant seat in the game of musical chairs.
She decided she’d go for treasurer. For some reason, people voted for her as if herded in a cattle drive.
And it was Shoffner who got arrested at her home on Saturday afternoon. According to the FBI, she had just accepted from an investment broker her latest $6,000 wad of hundred-dollar bills rolled up in a pie-box.
So this would seem the ideal time for me to introduce you to Duncan Baird.
He’s in his third and final term as a young Republican state representative from Lowell. He is a securities and investments businessman.
He has distinguished himself in his three legislative terms for two things.
First, he accepts nothing from lobbyists. State Rep. Ann Clemmer of Bryant told me that Baird would take a pen from a lobbyist only to use the pen to write the lobbyist a personal check for the price of the pen.
Second, when Davy Carter surged into the speaker’s office and looked around to build a team that could govern competently, he told me that Baird, quiet and unassuming, was “going to have to step up” and showcase his skills as co-chairman of the powerful Joint Budget Committee. Baird did so.
Republicans have been saying for months that Baird is their ideal candidate for treasurer in 2014.
Indeed, he offers demonstrated records of professional qualification and integrity.
So this two-party system might do us some good after all.
Now I’m calling for more Republican auditors and treasurers and fewer abortion bills and gun bills.
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.