The man for the job

So I had coffee the other afternoon with the incoming speaker of the state House of Representatives, a 38-year-old berry farmer and Baptist deacon from Judsonia by the name of Jeremy Gillam.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

Right away some of the righter-wing Republicans are wondering what in the wide world he was doing talking with the guy who writes all those evil lies about how Barack Obama is neither Kenyan nor Muslim nor communist.

They should relax. Gillam is simply a near-obsessive and diligent worker who has been doing everything in his power to prepare well to lead the House during this potentially epic session--the first in modern times both with strong Republican legislative majorities and a new Republican governor.

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So Gillam was attending the Political Animals Club meeting a few weeks ago when they introduced me for a panel discussion as having written about the Arkansas Legislature for decades. It occurred to him that maybe I could add a small helping of historical context to his extensive preparations--to the kind of planning common to a man who has spent his adulthood pruning the berry vines and looking out for insect infestation and readying to pounce during abbreviated harvest periods for blackberries and blueberries and muscadines.

And he does all that without federal crop insurance, which is not available to berry growers.

That year of the Easter freeze put him out of business. Last year's heavy rainfall damaged his crop. In such cases, he said, you need to have put money aside and maybe know a banker who can advance a little loan against what you'll surely earn when nature treats you more kindly next year.

So he suggested we visit. I nominated a beer or glass of wine. He said no, he couldn't do that, but that he would sure like to chat over a cup of coffee.

First let me say that I sized up Gillam quickly as one of the nicest fellows I've ever met.

He offers an interesting mix of trusting and guileless optimism and a full awareness that he has only four years of legislative experience.

He grinned when I pronounced him a classic salt-of-the-earth Arkansas good ol' boy--a graduate of ASU-Beebe and Arkansas State in Jonesboro who tends to those berries with his brother and serves as a deacon of that Searcy Baptist church and raises those two boys, 10 and 7, and watches Castle every week and looks forward to the annual House-Senate basketball game for charity because he was a pretty fair 6-3 postman for Beebe High back in the day.

My second assessment is that Gillam is the absolutely ideal House speaker for this brave new legislative world.

He is as thoroughly conservative as they come on defining social and economic issues. But, at the same time, he voted for the private option last year and seems to value nonpartisan cooperation and legislative order and civility more than philosophy.

He will appoint three Democratic chairmen of committees because he promised that kind of bipartisanship when running for speaker and is a man of his word even though he had not remotely expected Republicans to take a 64-36 lead.

Bipartisan leaders have influenced him. Mike Beebe, the Democratic governor who hails like Gillam from White County and attended college with Gillam's dad, calls Jeremy his nephew. Outgoing speaker Davy Carter tabbed Gillam to head the House Management Committee the last two years because Gillam was organizationally obsessive and well-trained by the demands of high-stakes berry management to prepare thoroughly and work efficiently under stress.

I should relate that Gillam's thinking is that this legislative session, while challenging, should be no more dramatic than previous ones fought over the Lake View school case or congressional redistricting or the private option.

My contrary thinking is that this session will be screwier than any other because of the raging inexperience both in the legislative and executive branches and the legislative tension between pragmatic conservatives and impractical right-wing extremists.

But I do offer this new observation: Gillam is such a consummate hard worker and nice guy that I can envision members making concessions they might not otherwise make simply to spare him the personal failure of leading a debacle of a session.

He's the kind of guy you'd like to help if you could.

One thing I've learned in decades of covering the Arkansas Legislature is that state legislating is as much about personality as policy--more, probably.

And Jeremy Gillam is precisely the personality this situation requires.

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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 on 12/21/2014

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