The first Arkansas governor to be born and raised in Benton County takes his oath of office Tuesday.
"I'd like to be a part of history," Asa Hutchinson, the governor-elect, said when told that the only governor from Benton County to precede him moved there to begin a law practice after the Civil War.
Hutchinson said the election of a Benton County native shows erosion in the state's regional political divisions.
Northwest Arkansas was a Republican foothold in a state dominated by Democrats for most of Hutchinson's career, which started in an unsuccessful race for prosecuting attorney in Benton County against a Democrat in 1978. Hutchinson lost a U.S. Senate race in 1986, a race for state attorney general in 1990 and a bid for governor in 2006.
"I started out without any interest in politics," Hutchinson said. "My plans were to be a successful small-town lawyer. Three things got me started. First, there was Ronald Reagan. His conservative values reflected my own and the way he expressed them appealed to me. Second, I could see that the state needed a functioning two-party system. Third, the Democrats at the time required people running for office to take a loyalty oath, pledging to support all Democratic candidates. I couldn't stomach that."
Blind party loyalty was never a factor in Hutchinson's determination to get elected as a Republican, said Kim Hendren, his brother-in-law.
"I don't know if he could make it in the U.S. Republican Party today, where you have to do what the leadership says and where the Democrats are the enemy," Hendren said of Hutchinson.
"I was elected to the state Senate as a Democrat in 1978, replacing the only Republican in the state Senate at the time," Hendren said. "Asa ran for prosecuting attorney that same year as a Republican. We helped each others' campaigns. We worked as hard for each other as we did for ourselves."
Hutchinson's parents were Republicans who owned a store in Oklahoma, Hendren said. The Hutchinsons decided to sell their business and move back to an Arkansas farm to spend more time with their children, Hendren said.
"They campaigned just as hard for me, too," Hendren said. "Coral was the biggest factor in the success of all of us," he said, referring to Hutchinson's mother. Hutchinson's father, John Malcolm Hutchinson, "would drive my Volkswagen van on campaigns and, if it was late before he was done, sleep in it at night."
"Asa became Republican because conservative Democrats at the time were what Republicans say they are," Hendren said. "They believe you have to work hard, but you should be able to keep what you earn. At the same time, they thought the big guys shouldn't be allowed to push the little guy around."
Hutchinson's decision to enter politics as a Republican prompted warnings from his fellow attorneys in Benton County, the governor-elect said. The state's last Republican governor, Winthrop Rockefeller, won one term in 1968 while the Democratic Party was badly divided.
"We have a very supportive bar association in Benton County," Hutchinson said. "They made sure everybody had enough business to live on. People told me not to be a Republican, that it would hurt my career. I'd never get a government appointment, for instance.
"I guess I was stubborn."
U.S. Sen. John Boozman, R-Rogers, had never run for public office when Hutchinson began his political career.
"He was kind of like what Barbara Mandrell sang in one of her songs -- I was country before country was cool," Boozman said of Hutchinson. "Well, Asa was Republican before Republican was cool."
Then Ronald Reagan won election in 1980, and Hutchinson was one of the few openly Republican practicing attorneys in the state. That also was the year that Frank White, a Republican, won election as governor over an up-and-coming Democrat named Bill Clinton.
"After Reagan was elected, Jim Mixon said to me, 'You know, you could be appointed U.S. attorney," Hutchinson said. Mixon was city attorney for Bentonville at the time. "It was the first time I'd heard that. President Reagan didn't have many options, I guess, and he picked me," Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson became the youngest U.S. attorney in the country at age 31.
In statewide politics, though, Hutchinson fell victim to regional divides -- the perception that he was the "Northwest" candidate -- in each statewide race he ran, he said. He was finally elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996 -- in Northwest Arkansas' 3rd Congressional District.
Northwest Arkansas went Republican before any other part of the state because of its history and, in large part, because of Hutchinson, Hendren said.
"It was hard to make any money up here," Hendren said. "Sam Walton and J.B. Hunt hadn't come here yet. My father worked for a dollar a day and often had to go to Missouri to do it. There was an attitude that you had to work very hard for anything you got and that you had every right to keep it."
As late as 2006, Hutchinson carried only 13 of Arkansas' 75 counties in his governor's race against Democrat Mike Beebe. Of those 13 counties, 11 were in his old congressional district.
Then, in 2010, the voting population of the state began breaking with Democratic state candidates over national party issues as diverse as health care, budget deficits and marriage equality. Republicans won control of the state Legislature in 2012 for the first time since the 19th century.
Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College and a former delegate to the Democratic National Convention, agreed that the Republican Party in Arkansas is no longer operating from a single, regional base.
"When he was first running, Republicans only existed in Northwest Arkansas and a few families in Little Rock," Barth said of Hutchinson.
As recently as 2008, one-third of Republican primary votes came from Northwest Arkansas 3rd Congressional District. In 2014, that fraction was one-sixteenth, election records show.
Now Hutchinson will preside over a state government where Republicans control all seven major constitutional offices and hold large majorities in each chamber of the Legislature. The partisan divide between Northwest Arkansas and the rest of the state has vanished, the governor-elect said.
"We have a governor from the Northwest, a lieutenant governor from south Arkansas and a treasurer from central Arkansas," he said. "And it's a clean Republican sweep. We have excellent support in the Northeast, too. We also have a Senate president and a speaker of the House from Searcy. I think the realization that we all need each other is greater than it's ever been. We need the mountains, the farms and the timberlands.
"After a while, the rest of the state decided that maybe those Northwestern Arkansas Republicans weren't that far out there after all," Hutchinson said.
Boozman noted that issues facing Arkansans can still differ regionally even if the political divides have blurred. Boozeman was the only Republican member of the the Arkansas congressional delegation in 2010, representing the 3rd Congressional District. Now he is the state's senior senator and the longest-serving member of Congress from Arkansas in an entirely Republican state delegation.
"Northwest Arkansas has a shortage of infrastructure because of growth, while other areas have the problem of not growing, or even having a declining population," Boozman said.
Former U.S. Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt of Harrison was Arkansas' only Republican congressman for decades. Hammerschmidt "has always been a great mentor and a great friend to me, and always reminds me that once an election is over, we don't just represent Democrats or Republicans but the people of Arkansas," Boozman said.
NW News on 01/12/2015