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Benny's historic coalition Tuesday, Jan 10, 2006 By John Brummett It was nearing noon Monday at the bottom of the marbled stairway connecting the second and third floors of the state Capitol. Dennis Jungmeyer, noted car dealer lobbyist, rounded the corner and stopped to tell me, "There are 127 members of the state House of Representatives today." Actually, there are only a hundred any day, barring a criminally forced resignation or a call to that great general assembly in the sky. Jungmeyer's point was that there'd have to be 127 members for all those who had made commitments in the imminent race for the speaker of the House for the session of 2007 to keep those commitments. Lots of members had promised both ways - to Rep. Benny Petrus of Stuttgart, the back-slapping car dealer and lobbyist-friendly good ol' boy who let Deltic Timber lobbyists use his apartment space for entertaining in last year's session, and Rep. Will Bond of Jacksonville, the bright young lawyer who chaired the committee that gave a do-not-pass recommendation to Deltic Timber's attempted end run to develop on the shores of Central Arkansas' water supply. Rep. Shirley Borhauer of Bella Vista told me on the way up the stairs that she was for Bond, a pragmatic and progressive Democrat. She called his election important to good government. She said she was exasperated that so many of her Republican colleagues from Northwest Arkansas were intending to vote for Petrus, a conservative Democrat, only because they'd been offered choice committee assignments. She said constituent services kept her so busy she wouldn't even want a committee chairmanship. Rep. Jay Bradford of Pine Bluff, a liberal Democrat, told me with great cheer that Bond was a cinch. I doubted him. He said he was ever the optimist. I said, oh, yes, it was his optimism that put him in the U.S. Congress in 1994. He laughed, cackled even, and said having lost to Jay Dickey was a heavy burden. Another House member and Bond supporter, unidentified for this purpose, told me he had thought the race was in hand for Bond but there was a story to be told about a few African-American members. Black legislators' natural alliance would be seem to be with the Central Arkansas and the more progressive candidate, meaning Bond. But it appeared, I was told, that some of the African-American members had made the same kind of alliance with Petrus that Sen. Tracy Steele of North Little Rock had made with dark siders at the other end of the third floor. You will recall that Steele fell in with a mostly rural power-playing group in the Senate calling itself The Brotherhood, and, in exchange for whatever favors the group has promised him, voted against his own constituents' safe drinking water on the Deltic Timber issue. Notice what we have: First there was concern by a Republican that many of her Republican colleagues were going with the "country caucus" favorite, meaning Petrus, owing to committee appointment considerations. Then there was worry by a Bond supporter that some of the black House members had made an accommodation with Petrus and the good ol' boy coalition. It shouldn't have surprised, then, that Petrus won the secret ballot by 58-42. Perhaps we should rise in praise of this Benny Petrus for doing something never done before, meaning unifying blacks, Northwest Arkansas Republicans and conservative rural Democrats. After that, the best thing to do is hope that some of his alliances aren't as unholy as we might suspect. ------- 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. |
