|
|
| |
| Sat, Jul. 5, 2008 |  |
 |
|
||
| |
Monday's tipping point for Arkansas Sunday, Jan 8, 2006 By John Brummett Thoughtful observers of state government believe it to be the second most important political contest of the year, behind only the governor's race. The state House of Representatives gathers Monday for a special meeting to choose either Will Bond of Jacksonville, a bright young lawyer, or Benny Petrus of Stuttgart, a personable farmer and car dealer, as speaker of the House for the next session beginning in January 2007. It's true that Arkansas nears a tipping point and that the speaker's race could be a factor in whether we go over the edge. Speaker of the House once was mostly ceremonial. Now, with term limits having wrecked the seniority system, the speaker puts a machine in place by naming committee chairmen. Arkansas has been led in the modern era by responsible, competent, pragmatic, technocratic, mildly visionary and altogether progressive problem-solvers, mostly Democratic, but not exclusively so. I refer to governors like Sid McMath, Winthrop Rockefeller, Dale Bumpers, David Pryor, Bill Clinton and, yes, Mike Huckabee. I refer to legislative leaders such as Mike Beebe, Jim Argue and the current House speaker, Bill Stovall. You can throw David Bisbee of Rogers, a Republican state senator and the current Joint Budget Committee chairman, into that group as well. Their leadership has provided a state government that, while exasperating and failing at times, has avoided meltdowns and kept the state generally moving forward educationally and economically. Meanwhile, some of our neighboring states have fallen into governmental demagoguery and dysfunction. The occasional Republican governor aside, we've remained overwhelmingly Democratic, at least nominally, while most other states in our region have gone Republican. The governor's race in November, likely to pit Beebe as the Democrat against Asa Hutchinson as the Republican, will most likely determine whether the state remains on that modern course and in that modern style, with Beebe, or makes, via Hutchinson, the plunge into the conservative, anti-government Republicanism of, say, Mississippi and Alabama. Huckabee has been entirely too moderate and progressive to have effected such a tilt. He has spent too much time feuding with far-right elements of his own party - Shiite Republicans, he's called them - to galvanize anything resembling a two-party movement. Hutchinson, on the other hand, is a true right-winger. In the choice for speaker, the mid-30s lawyer, Will Bond, offers a continuation of the modern course. In two terms he has emerged as a thorough reader and savvy analyzer of bills whose responsible advice on legal issues carries great influence. In his very first term, when barely 30 years old, he came up with the compromise on school consolidation that merely salvaged a special session and settled, if only for a short time, the Lake View case. In the last session, his second, he chaired the committee that killed the Deltic Timber power grab and saved Central Arkansas' water supply from greedy development. Petrus offers an extremely conservative and lobbyist-friendly brand of Arkansas Democratic politics. It could be expected to embrace and assist a Hutchinson governorship, if one were to materialize. Most estimates are that Petrus will get maybe 18 of the 28 Republican votes. That's down, though, from 28 of 28, suggesting that perhaps his early lead in this race is vaporizing. While Bond's style is technical proficiency in pursuit of solving problems and fashioning incremental progress, Petrus relies more on good ol' boy ingratiating than issue command. He raised about $70,000 for a re-election campaign, then, when unopposed, divvied up the money among House colleagues who had opposition. As one of his colleagues put it the other day, Petrus' style of legislative leadership is this, with apologies for car-dealer stereotypes: "Tell me what we need to do to put you in this truck today." This is a choice as clear as it is important. People tell me 90 votes are firm, 45 each way. That leaves 10. ------- 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. |
