When I told a Democratic audience the other night to be righteous, what I meant was to do the right thing and put state over party.
There's no good reason to be active in politics otherwise. Good always will be rewarded, if not by instant gratification.
Ours is a state in which political and cultural change happens at an underwater pace. That's unless Barack Obama gets elected president. In that event, everyone in the state comes up out of the water and gets on jet skis to abandon their lives as conservative Democrats and become raging Republicans.
That's why I encouraged patience as well. The current Arkansas political landscape, given over to a mean conservatism, will reject sodding but might respond to seeding.
Being righteous--putting state over party--sounds obvious and simple. But it's neither, nor is it much practiced in Washington. Newly minority Democratic legislators in Arkansas, however, have engaged in it admirably, and deserve credit.
"Thanks for encouraging them to do the right thing," Gov. Asa Hutchinson once said to me about my columns advocating Medicaid expansion and resisting any notion that the Democratic legislators might oppose it.
But those Democratic legislators were going to do the right thing on their own, if with grumbling to which they were entitled. Gubernatorial thanks were due them. Hutchinson's governorship well may have been saved by them.
Hutchinson inherited the private option, meaning the use of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion money to buy private insurance for working poor people up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. The program saved rural hospitals and pumped enough federal money into the state treasury to make plausible the one thing Republicans always want desperately, which is to cut income taxes.
Needing a three-fourths vote to pass the appropriation, Hutchinson set out to rebrand and conservatize Medicaid expansion to try to bring enough in his party on board to get to three-fourths.
It was assumed the Democratic caucus would vote reliably for Medicaid expansion. But, for a while, Democrats talked of leveraging their support to try to get more money for pre-kindergarten programs.
But that was foolhardy, as they understood. What was their message, anyway--give pre-K programs more money or we'll take health insurance away from poor people, in which case we'd get neither?
Some even talked briefly--and never with any wide seriousness--of opposing the conservative flourishes of Hutchinson's rebranding. The idea was to let Medicaid expansion die so that Hutchinson and the Republicans would get the blame for the ensuing disaster for rural hospitals and the state budget.
But that wouldn't have been right-eous. It wouldn't have been putting the state first. It would have meant taking health insurance from more than a quarter-million poor people.
Similarly, a few Democrats in the last session briefly contemplated voting against that follow-up bill to "fix" the most egregious provisions of that guns-galore bill that Rep. Charlie Collins and the NRA crammed down Hutchinson's and the state's throats.
Democrats could have declared that the original bill was beyond fixing, worthy only of repeal, and attempted to stick Hutchinson with the ire of Razorback fans for not exempting college sports events. But they didn't. They did the right thing, which was to make a tragic bill marginally less tragic.
"I'll vote for your bill. I don't want to," state Sen. Stephanie Flowers of Pine Bluff boomed to the Republican gun nuts in her floor speech explaining her support, using that word loosely, for the marginal "fix."
So now state Democratic chairman Michael John Gray, a state representative from Augusta, tells me the party will sure-enough mount a loyal opponent to Hutchinson's re-election. That's although the prospects, all agree, are grim, in great part because Democratic legislators did the right thing on the big issues and enhanced Hutchinson's first-term performance.
"There are things that need to be said and have attention called to them," Gray said, mentioning the removal of up to 60,000 working poor people from Medicaid expansion and that guns are now likely to be ubiquitous at Little League baseball games.
Gray also mentioned widespread speculation that Hutchinson, if he is to govern more ideologically, would do it in the second term.
"We'll have somebody good," Gray said.
That's what loyal opposition is for. A campaign is the time to make a vigorous challenge even if the best you might reasonably hope in the short term is to slow the pace of policies you find destructive.
That's righteous.
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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.
Editorial on 06/01/2017