The Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce wanted a panel on which I sat Monday to lend modern historical perspective to Arkansas politics.
As the senior member of the panel, I got handed the assignment. It occurred to me afterward that I ought to share the analysis — insightful or misguided — with column readers.
The context for my answer was what I called the “modern era,” which I defined as my lifetime, the 1950s forward, and which I acknowledged was getting less modern by the hour.
The premise is that Arkansas hit bottom in the 1950s, mostly because of the international shame of the Little Rock integration crisis. Arkansas actually went backward in that decade in population and economic output.
The result was that Arkansas was seen as what it was — a reactionary place politically and a backwater place economically.
So my modern political era actually began with the end of the Orval Faubus governorship in January 1967. And it is an era best described in two words — moderation (from reactionary politics) and modernization (from backwater economics).
Those objectives represent the essence of a series of governors now spanning a little over 50 years — from Win Rockefeller up to and including a special guest in our audience, Mike Beebe, and the governor now serving, Asa Hutchinson.
Rockefeller was a New York-style Republican who sought to moderate the state’s racial politics — singing “We Shall Overcome” on the Capitol steps — and modernize the state’s economy by lending the power of his wealth and family name to lure manufacturing.
Dale Bumpers was a young progressive who realized in 1970 that the Democrats needed to be like Rockefeller and not Faubus — to moderate and modernize.
He reorganized and streamlined government, saying his businessman brother had told him no enterprise could be run efficiently by the way state government was set up. Bumpers raised taxes and pushed for free textbooks, childhood immunizations and two-year community colleges.
David Pryor, a post-Faubus “Young Turk” reformer from early adulthood, furthered the theme, though less eventfully.
Then came young Bill Clinton, tempering his natural liberalism to seek moderate leadership that would continue to modernize. Then he got beat for being insufficiently moderate, meaning too liberal. So he forged his way back into office by being consummately moderate. He talked of a global economy and high technology and the state’s need to invest in education to develop human capital.
Jim Guy Tucker had a similar focus until his governorship was ended by Ken Starr’s obsessions. Then a Republican — a far different Mike Huckabee from the demagogue now running ineptly for president — grew state government in a moderate way and modernized it with new health insurance for children and school consolidation.
Beebe was the last natural Democratic descendant of the Bumpers-Pryor-Clinton era. He made the tie between education and economic development his theme, but his rhetorical message often was that Arkansas needed to stop thanking God for Mississippi and start aiming higher and thinking better of itself.
The signature accomplishment of his governorship was the adoption of the private-option form of Medicaid expansion, a modernizing and moderating program he got passed in cooperation with three bright and innovative young Republican legislators.
That brings us to Hutchinson, the first governor of the full-throttled Republican era, one that finds him working with an overwhelmingly and historically Republicanized state Legislature.
It’s become obvious that Hutchinson is seeking to align his governorship with the trend line of those pre-existing principles.
He wants to keep the private option, a moderate position.
He wants to emphasize computer skills in school, a modernizing notion.
When confronted with a religious-rights bill in the last session, one that would permit discrimination against same-sex persons on account of religious belief, he veered from his religious fundamentalist background. He acceded to strong signals from Wal-Mart and other business leaders. They were telling him the world was diversifying and becoming more gay-accepting and that Arkansas needed not to repeat the devastating errors of the 1950s.
So Hutchinson asked the Legislature to take back its bill and … well … moderate and modernize it. He said attitudes were changing so strongly in a generational sense that one of his own sons had asked him not to sign the bill.
Trying together to get more moderate and modern is a worthier political focus than banal fighting between left and right and “R” and “D.”
We’ll see if Hutchinson remains the moderate and modernizer at heart that I think I see, and, if so, whether his right flank will let him function as such.
Will he end up beleaguered like John Boehner or impressively ensconced as another in a line of governors nudging the state less in a partisan way than a moderating and modernizing way?
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.