COMMENTARY

Conflicted interests

Moderately Republican long before hard-right Republicanism rose to power in Arkansas, the Impact Management Group of Little Rock is a prominent political consulting firm that walks a delicate balance.

Sometimes it stumbles, such as lately.

Led by two personable former executive directors of the state Republican Party—Richard Bearden and Clint Reed—the company is something of a go-to place for people needing ingratiation with a state Legislature gone majority GOP.

It’s not as simple as that Impact Management is an interpreter for Democrats to Republicans. But sometimes it can seem a bit like that.

Over lunch the other day in their conference room, Bearden and Reed reminded me of my reporting several years ago of their early chumminess with Mike Beebe.

That helped them in one way. It’s a rare political firm that can offer lobbying help with the emerging Republican legislative majority while getting along handsomely at the same time with the Democrat in the governor’s office.

But it caused them heartburn in another way. Some of those new Republican legislators don’t see any need to get along with a Democratic governor. They don’t necessarily trust a “Republican” lobbyist who does.

But the firm has performed well and grown, largely on this kind of appeal: An alliance of health-care providers and Medicaid receivers was formed in 2013 to lobby the newly Republicanized Legislature for Medicaid expansion. It occurred to the group that it needed help talking to Republicans.

The standard spiel that poor people needed compassionate aid and that it would be crazy to turn down federal money didn’t work with those guys. But the economic arguments and practical considerations needed to be aired effectively.

So the group asked around and came to the quick solution that it needed to hire Impact Management. It was an establishment Republican firm that had helped elect many of those GOP legislators. But it was not as doctrinaire on the far-right as many of them. At least it could bring up Democratic interest in Medicaid expansion—in a practical economic context, anyway—and get Republican legislators to listen rather than instinctively recoil.

You know the story: A few innovative and moderate Republican legislators joined Beebe’s Human Services officials in designing the nationally innovative private-option form of Medicaid expansion. Reed and Bearden were on the scene lobbying hard for it. The epic measure passed narrowly, even miraculously.

So that brings us to the current matter, the reason for the lunch, the controversy.

An unyielding “no” vote on the private option was Rep. Terry Rice of Waldron. He thought he was going to be speaker of the House until moderate Republican Davy Carter, who championed the private option, went around him in the stretch with mostly Democratic votes.

Over in the Senate, an unlikely but vital “aye” vote for the private option—in a chamber where the “aye” votes seemed at best to hover around the bare essential of 27—was the otherwise conservative Sen. Bruce Holland of Greenwood, mainly famous for speeding through Perry County.

So now Rice is term-limited in the House and has decided to run in the May primary for the Senate against … Holland.

And Rice has retained as general consultant to his campaign … well, that would be the Impact Management Group.

Let’s make sure we’re clear: Impact Management lobbied for clients for passage of the private option. Now it advances the candidacy of a private-option opponent against a private-option supporter in a body where there are no “aye” votes to spare.

Let’s be clearer: Losing one vote in the Senate could end the private option.

Senate advocates of the private option—Michael Lamoureux, Jonathan Dismang and David Sanders—first pleaded with Bearden and Reed not to take Rice as a client. Now they are highly displeased.

Bearden and Reed make a simple case: Reed is a longtime friend of Rice, and longtime friendship counts for a lot. And, yes, the private option is a major issue, but the firm has never applied a litmus test of issues for clients and is not going to start now to betray an old friend and oblige the Senate leadership.

Meantime, Rice is proceeding to hammer Holland for the very vote that Rice’s campaign consultant wanted Holland to cast.

Some say this is merely a growing pain of the state Republican Party.

Friendship indeed counts for a lot. And Arkansas has long been a nest for odd bedfellows. But cynicism, or at least opportunism, or the appearance thereof, counts for something, too.

Lawyers cannot do this kind of thing. They must keep their clients on only one side of a lawsuit.

Will Impact Management lobby for the private option again next year? If so, and if Rice is a new senator, then why should the firm bother lobbying him after it aided his campaign in which he ousted a solid vote for the private option? And how will the Republican firm get along next year with fellow Republicans who resent the representation of Rice and will run the state Senate—Dismang, who will be president pro tempore, for one?

Those are good questions—so good that I am forced to conclude that Bearden and Reed have one client too many this season, not to mention two interests that are entirely too conflicted.

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.

Upcoming Events