They didn’t know me and I certainly didn’t know them. And I’m thinking I learned more from them than they learned from me.
This was Friday afternoon, the day before the Young Democrats of Arkansas would conduct their actual convention. About 50 or 60 of them, representing college and high school chapters, gathered at the Arkansas Education Association for a day of presentations and interactions.
I got invited to speak, quite generously, because I have a unique perspective, being old, and I sometimes criticize the Arkansas Democratic Party’s heritage, relevance and struggling tactics, being a curmudgeon.
I began: How many of you happened to read my online-only column in midweek in which I thought aloud about what to say to you here today? Six hands. Maybe 10. How many of you read a newspaper? Ten hands. Maybe a dozen.
How many of you would be just as happy if I left and only came back if I had beer? Just kidding. I didn’t ask that. I was afraid of the answer.
So I summarized: I’m not a Democrat, but a newspaper commentator who tries to tell the truth and thus often sounds like a Democrat. Arkansas politics for the half-century I experienced it until 2010 was a no-party tradition in which people called themselves Democrats because that was the default association. As the default depository, the Arkansas Democratic Party was a disjointed, incoherent, soft alliance of white rural populists and conservatives, blacks, a few liberals and people who were Republicans nationally but didn’t apply that to the state. Democrats amounted to segregationists into the 1960s, and reform came through the transformative governorship of a liberal transplanted New York Republican — Winthrop Rockefeller.
After that, the successful governorships of Dale Bumpers, David Pryor and Bill Clinton were based on cults of personality, not the Democratic Party of which they were members. Now that Arkansas Democrats are seeking to fashion a real and minority party after the Republican coup, with no practice or precedent, they struggle to devise a coherent message and to apply effective tactics and strategies.
And some of the legislative tactics have been silly — holding up appropriations, trying to leverage Medicaid expansion for something unclear, proposing an increase in pre-K funding without an evident plan to find the money, mainly so that Republicans would oppose it, thus generating an opportunity for state Democratic headquarters to put out a silly statement attacking the Republicans as anti-toddler, which is reflective of the purely tactical partisan legislative politics that seeks no actual policy or solution and has trivialized and paralyzed and degraded Congress.
None of that got a rise out of anybody, except a roll of the eyes from House Democratic Minority Leader Michael John Gray of Augusta in the back of the room.
What got a rise out of the group was when I apologized that my context was state politics when, I was sure, most of my listeners were defined by, and motivated by, national politics.
It was a Mississippian in the back of the room, a young man who was waiting to speak to the group next, who got up to ask how I could possibly say that the folks in front of me were more interested in national than state politics. And that inspired the audience to explain that I was speaking to the people who had gone door to door for gubernatorial candidate Mike Ross and legislative candidates and to get petitions signed to get a minimum-wage increase on the ballot.
State politics is where the national issues really get imposed, a young woman explained.
Well, all right, then. Excuse me. It appeared that the old guy had been caught in stereotype and assumption.
These particular Young Democrats of Arkansas had the right focus. They had earned the respect of grass-roots work.
The problem will be that politics is much slower to change in Arkansas than nationally. Politics in Arkansas moves as if under water. Politics nationally moves as if competing at NASCAR. Neither is the right speed.
The Arkansas Democratic challenge will remain great so long as Republicans like Asa Hutchinson remain in charge and manage to keep government functioning while holding their kook-right obstructionists at bay.
The best advice I could give — assuming they still wanted it from one who had stereotyped them — was, as I phrased it, “stay in your sane place, and on the right side of history, and wait to welcome Arkansas back someday.”
Tactics such as proposing pre-K funding increases merely for the sake of a political point, rather than a mathematical solution, won’t much work in Arkansas. You could pass all the pre-K appropriations you want, actually, and accomplish nothing unless you were in the room when the Revenue Stabilization Act got written to assign portions of approved appropriations to categories of priority for actual spending. About a dozen insiders worked on that over the weekend at the Governor’s Mansion.
As for the right side of history, the nominal Democrats of Arkansas weren’t there for the race struggle. But they are there now, and need to remain there, on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Even otherwise conservative business leaders in the state know that the culture has changed. They know the future of business success must be open to the diversity and tolerance that Arkansas and Southern states are as-yet unwilling to accept.
In the end, doing right and being right will work politically. It simply shouldn’t take as long as it does from under water here in Arkansas.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.