Charlie Cole Chaffin said she’d recently reread an old column I wrote about her.
Not the one calling her Granny Clampett, I hoped.
For a television commercial in 1994, she’d sat grimly in a rocking chair with a shotgun across her lap. That was when she was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor against Mike Huckabee. The point was to demonstrate that she was no gun controller.
No, not that one, Chaffin said. The column to which she referred was from her headiest days in the state Senate in the late 1980s. She co-sponsored with Jay Bradford an ethics-reform package that got blocked by the Senate leadership, mainly Nick Wilson.
As she and Bradford scurried back from then-Gov. Bill Clinton’s office to the Senate, carrying the latest word in dramatic last-minute maneuvering, Bradford turned to her and said-good-naturedly, I should emphasize-that she could have joined the Junior League and saved herself such stress.
Even among friends and allies to the left of center, and even in good humor,gender stereotype reared its head.
Come to think of it: Men in politics can pose with guns without getting called Granny Clampett.
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On Saturday evening a fledgling nonpartisan group called Women Lead Arkansas, seeking to promote women for political office regardless of party, honored Chaffin, a retired educator, and other state female political pioneers at a reception at Philander Smith College.
I dropped by because I’ve long resisted the frequent assertion that our state Legislature, for better or worse, presents an accurate microcosm of the state.
That can’t be so if women make up more than half the population but typically less than a fifth of the Legislature.
We need more women in politics, not on the basis that they’d be more progressive-because there’s scant evidence of that-but on the premise that they’d bring a different life experience, a different chemistry and a more accurate representation of the constituency.
Former state Rep. Johnnie Roebuck of Arkadelphia, the first female leader of the House Democratic Caucus and a board member of the group, told the assembly of 50 or so that there was a record number of female state legislators in 2009, but that the number had declined since.
It’s not that women don’t file for office in good numbers, she said. It’s that women are generally less trained in campaigns than men, Roebuck said.
That’s why Women Lead Arkansas had just conducted a day-long series of campaigning workshops.
The Democratic Party, at risk of losing a majority of state constitutional offices and thus formal majority-party status, is responding by offering women as unopposed primary candidates for secretary of state (Susan Inman) and treasurer (Karen Garcia) and auditor (Regina Stewart Hampton).
For that matter, the last-minute surprise Democratic candidate to oppose Mike Ross for governor … that was a woman, Lynette Bryant, a substitute teacher who attended the reception.
Alas, she may not be quite ready for prime time. She declined to talk with me about her gubernatorial bid, saying she wanted to get her website up and running first.
Be aware that a governor sometimes must address matters spontaneously on a schedule set by events, not website construction.
Lest anyone suspect that a female political insurgence would be Democratic, consider that Arkansas Republicans offer a record number of female candidacies this year.
Women can be right-wingers, too. Consider Rep. Ann Clemmer of Bryant handling Jason Rapert’s unconstitutional abortion bill in the House. Consider Sen. Missy Irvin of Mountain View reversing herself to oppose the private option.
Consider Sarah Palin, if you aren’t squeamish.
One of those female Republican candidates this year, term-limited state Rep. Debra Hobbs of Rogers, seeks the lieutenant governor’s office.
She attended the reception and told me I’d written one column she liked. That was the one assailing U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin for presuming to settle for lieutenant governor because he didn’t have time to hold a real office and while he would be engaged in undisclosed outside employment.
Hobbs had an interesting thought. It was that we look not at abolition of the silly lieutenant governor’s office, but at constitutional reform merging it with another office with actual duties, such as secretary of state.
She also mentioned merging the ministerial but important functions of treasurer and auditor.
I asked her whether-with state Rep. Andy Mayberry also in the Republican field and offering to abolish the office-she thought there might be a runoff.
She said she didn’t much think so. She figured she would just go ahead and win outright in the first primary.
That’s a tad uppity, someone might say good-naturedly, if someone wanted to commit a gender offense.
Saying you’ll condescend to be lieutenant governor in your spare time because Congress has proven too much work, as in Griffin’s case-now that’s uppity.
It’s just like a man, somebody might say.
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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 15 on 03/18/2014