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Top five with an asterisk Thursday, Nov 17, 2005 By John Brummett Time magazine says Our Boy Mike is one of the nation's five best governors. This has prompted the rather predictable joking about how bad the other 45 must be. But I thought I'd take this opportunity to put on the record that while I lack intimate knowledge of all other governors, I offer on the surface no argument with Time. In fact, I hereby reassert that Arkansas history will credit Mike Huckabee as one of the state's best governors - top five, surely, behind Dale Bumpers but ahead of Bill Clinton, though with an asterisk on the latter, as I'll get around to explaining. Those ever-nuanced sons of Hope we call Slick Willie and the Huckster, aka President Butafuoco and His Eternal Huffiness, seem inherently to cry out for asterisks. History relies on verifiable records of accomplishment. Out-of-state grading of any governor relies on a general state of economic affairs and a consideration of major policy initiatives. Those play to Huckabee's strengths. Only by experiencing up close and in-the-moment his pettiness and ethical shortcomings and affinity for trappings can one come to know and lament the other persona, the one we call Bad Mike. And those things, frankly, seem a little more personal than substantive. It was much the same with Clinton. We'd tell out-of-staters that he was a slippery chameleon who'd rather climb a tree to tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. And they'd say, "Yeah, maybe, but he has emphasized education and economic development and been good on race, and boy, he makes a nice talk. He could have gone anywhere after Georgetown, Yale and Oxford. Yet he came back to your pitiable little state. What's the matter with you people down there?" They once called this Gorbachev Syndrome, by which a political leader is hailed outside his home but underappreciated at home. Consider the Huckabee governorship: Confronted with rampant child poverty, he embraced and advocated the ARKids First program to extend Medicaid to kids not only in welfare households, but those with working folks. Blessed with a tobacco settlement pouring hundreds of millions into a poor and unhealthy state over a quarter-century, he defied silly and partisan legislative resistance and went straight to the people to get the money committed to health and health education. Bequeathed crumbling interstate highways that were surely the very worst in the country, he sold the people on a half-billion dollars in debt to fix them. Hit with a Supreme Court ruling about the failure of our schools, he did what no governor since Sid McMath had dared - confront the state's static rural culture and propose widespread consolidation of schools. He finally brought Arkansas onto an on-ramp of the information superhighway by letting us renew out car tags online or by telephone. When you put it like that, ... Now, as for ranking Huckabee ahead of Clinton, but only with an asterisk: A paragraph detailing Clinton's gubernatorial accomplishments would not be as whizbang as the one above for Huckabee. But, then, Clinton never got millions dropped in his lap in a tobacco settlement. And Clinton confronted highway needs in the days before the federal Transportation Department cooked up this mechanism by which states could go into debt based on future federal turnback. So, Clinton, having to raise real money for roads, settled on car tag fees and got beat over it. Clinton wanted to modernize license renewals, but county clerks strongly resisted. And, finally, Clinton was hamstrung by being a governor during the Reagan Recession, while Huckabee benefited by being a governor during the Clinton Prosperity. So, you could say that Clinton did such a good job as president that Huckabee was able to be a better governor than Clinton had been. Asterisk, indeed. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
