Commentary: Asa's honeymoon ends

String of victories leads to asking too much

Sometimes, when you say it's my way or the highway, people take the highway.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson suffered the first major defeat of his administration this week. He failed to get just what he wanted from a special session. In fact, a major health care reform proposal of his was dropped for now. This setback resulted as much from human nature as from any dispute over health care.

More importantly, Hutchinson lost his perfect recent record as someone who can't be challenged for leadership of the Arkansas Republican Party. He can recover. Hopefully he will, because as anyone following politics outside of Arkansas knows, a GOP without an unchallenged leader can be an unruly thing.

The health care debate is exhaustively covered in the news pages. So this column's topics are mainly human nature and the political fallout.

The governor wanted a special session to approve his plan for controlling costs in government-funded care of people who have mental health or mental development issues. He insisted upon his version. The Legislature refused -- putting it harshly -- to rubber stamp his plan without even considering an alternative many of its members supported.

Hutchinson's plan would save an estimated $1.4 billion over five years. The lawmaker's plan would save $1 billion. Grossly oversimplified, the differences between the two plans is that the lawmakers' plan would intrude less on the patient-doctor relationship.

A difference of $400 million matters. The governor is trying to steer the state's canoe between a very narrow open space between rocks. He's trying to divert many millions of dollars to highways, cut taxes and keep the budget balanced at the same time. He wants to do this while the state's share of the costs of the tiresomely over-debated private option/"Arkansas Works" health care plan is about to go up. He wasn't trying to be king so much as do what people said they wanted.

This was when human nature kicked in. What people want, what they say they want and what they really want when a decision has to be made are three different things. Cautious politicians avoid asking people what they want. They ask people what they want most and what they're willing to give up to get it.

The governor enjoyed a remarkable two years. The Arkansas Republican Party's newborn majority deferred to him and was wise to do so. Barely six weeks ago, he gave his would-be challengers on health care a thorough thumping in the GOP primaries. He heavily and very effectively intervened in lawmaker races. After the March 1 votes were counted, he appeared more in control than he'd ever been.

Here's the best example I can give of what happened next. My wife and I love each other. We'd each do anything the other wanted within reason. But not if we're ordered to, or given no other option.

The governor did ask. But when he didn't get exactly what he wanted, he said it was his way or no way. Then what happened, happened.

In politics rather than marriage, sometimes asking isn't enough. You have to reward or threaten, or both. It's hard to threaten somebody who knows you have to have his or her vote and have it now. Special sessions -- especially those called only on a narrow topic or two -- don't provide a lot of rewards or punishments. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why governors shouldn't announce a special session until he has already lined up the votes.

Now the governor is going have to get the rest of his budget approved in the upcoming fiscal session without another $400 million in projected savings in his pocket. Also, note that the ever-growing problem of the prison population and the ever-growing needs of public education are still out there. Steering that narrow course will get harder every year. Approving a budget takes a three-quarters vote of the Legislature.

Hutchinson hasn't lost leadership of the state GOP. It's just not as absolute as it was a week ago. The timing is bad, though. We're about to go another round in our seemingly endless health care fights. A week ago, Hutchinson had opponents on the ropes. I'll go into more detail about that another day. For now, suffice it to say that when anti-private option fervor can't stir up more than 505 votes in a runoff election in Springdale, it's a dead issue as far as the public is concerned. At least it should have been.

Commentary on 04/09/2016

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