A bump in the road

As a former longtime congressman for southern Arkansas, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mike Ross knew he was little-known or unknown to about 40 percent of the voters elsewhere in the state.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

So his grand design was to have Mike Beebe, his former state Senate mentor and the popular incumbent Democratic governor, introduce him to that 40 percent with a television commercial now airing.

A targeted area surely was Jonesboro, a growing community distant from Ross’ congressional district but presumably ripe Beebe territory. The governor was from a little place down the road from Jonesboro. He grew up in the nearby vicinity around Newport. He is a proud alum of Jonesboro’s Arkansas State University.

So, speaking of Jonesboro, there is this other political thing that happened. The nominally Democratic state senator from there, Paul Bookout, got found out in such brazen ethical failings that he had to resign. And they had a special election Tuesday to replace him.

The Republican, a Tea Party extremist named John Cooper supported by a gaggle of black-helicopter observers in the region, was opposed by Steve Rockwell, a local businessman and moderate Democrat. The pervasive issue was the private-option form of Medicaid expansion, which Bookout had favored in narrow Senate passage, and which Rockwell voted to favor, but which Cooper ardently opposed as “Obamacare.”

Late in the campaign, Beebe made a local television commercial for Rockwell, one looking a lot like, and sounding a little like, the statewide spot he made for Ross.

The Rockwell ad featured Beebe’s venerable visage and his sage words. He advised that Washington politics was frustratingly dysfunctional, but that, down in Little Rock, they knew how to work together to pass that private option to help hospitals and save the state direct Medicaid expenses and thus free money for higher education institutions. Rockwell would continue that kind of reasonable leadership, and local voters should send him to Little Rock, Beebe counseled.

It was not a great deal different from Beebe’s declaration in the Ross ad that “no one is more independent”-i.e., not partisan the way they are in Washington-than his old buddy Mike Ross.

So they had their special Senate election in and around Jonesboro.

How’d that turn out?

Cooper, vowing to go Little Rock and do what he could to undo that private option (and he might be able to cast the decisive vote to kill it), beat Beebe’s endorsee, Rockwell, by a mere 57 percent to 43 percent. That’s a rout.

It is possible, perhaps likely, that it is as simple as that you will get beat in Arkansas right now if your opponent can attach to you three little syllables-Oh, Ba and Ma.

But this much also seems possible: Arkansas is famous for a cussed independence by which it can adore a politician personally but not give a hoot in heck about whom that adored politician endorses. It might even be that cranky, independent-minded and conservatively inclined Arkansas voters prefer that a candidate speak for himself rather than stand back and let the governor do his talking.

You have to think that Ross, a seriously savvy Arkansas politician, was wondering a little Tuesday night about how effectively Beebe’s introduction of him was playing in, say, the Jonesboro area-and maybe other areas. He unveiled that commercial during the ASU bowl game, you’ll recall.

And you have to think that Beebe-and the more reasonable Republican legislators like Davy Carter and Michael Lamoureux and David Sanders and John Burris and Jonathan Dismang-were wondering Tuesday night if all that hard work on the innovative private option, and all that noble labor signing up nearly a hundred thousand poor people for private insurance, will prove for utter naught in less than a month.

That’s because the appropriation to spend the federal money for the private option will be up for passage again in the budget-only session beginning Feb. 10. It will require a three-fourths vote, meaning 27 votes in the Senate, where, last year, it got 28, including Bookout’s that is now lost to Cooper.

Beyond that, every Republican legislator supporting the private option is probably wondering if he is vulnerable to this rabid “Oklabama” insurgence that is taking Arkansas over the rightwing cliff.

For his part, Ross can take some comfort in knowing he is a better and more flexible and more opportunistic politician than Rockwell-or just about anybody. Ross has a history of moving as far to the right as necessary-and that can be somewhere in the vicinity of the aforementioned cliff-to adapt to the electorate that confronts him. His history is to embrace a gun or blast a flag-burner or be against Obamacare after he was for it, kind of.

How to re-deploy his Blue Dog soul without losing fervor among black voters and his party’s left-leaning base-well, I would have told you two days ago that Beebe’s embrace helped with that. But then I looked at the returns Tuesday evening from Senate District 21 in and around Beebe’s old stomping ground. I saw 4,314 votes for the Tea Party and 3,227 votes for the Beebe party.

If Ross is as all-fired “independent” as Beebe says in that commercial, then he probably needs to speak up independently for himself. I just can’t figure out what he ought to say. It’s a difficult calibration-decrying those three syllables, Oh and Ba and Ma, while keeping your party’s base intact.

It may be that, in 2014, it’s hard to retrieve a state that has plunged over the cliff.

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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, Pages 17 on 01/16/2014

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