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Sorting out the raging nonpartisanship Thursday, May 15, 2008 By John Brummett This is a follow-up to the column in this space a couple of weeks ago in which they were struggling in Northwest Arkansas with the still-young concept, at least in Arkansas, of nonpartisanship in races for judgeships. They still are. Perhaps you recall that one candidate for the local seven-county judgeship on the intermediate state Court of Appeals, Courtney Henry of Fayetteville, had lined up endorsements from Democrats and Republicans. The latter included no less than John Paul Hammerschmidt, the former Republican congressman and a family friend. She perhaps was implicitly using bipartisan and nonpartisan synonymously, but, anyway, we get the point: She had backing from all kinds, without regard for party. Perhaps you further recall that the other candidate, Ronald Williams of Rogers, was impaired in his attempt to appear nonpartisan by the fact that his son-in-law and law partner was Tim Hutchinson Jr. Nothing says Republican in Arkansas like the name Hutchinson. To make partisan appearances even more vivid, the young Hutchinson had hired for consultant services one Jim Holt, the extremist Republican from Springdale who wants to deny humane services to illegal immigrants and edit evolution out of the school textbooks, among other affronts. It turned out that Holt has this thing about people he doesn't believe to be genuinely conservative yet who manage to garner conservative support. Such was the case with Courtney Henry, who, yes, is daughter-in-law of Morris and Ann Henry of Fayetteville, whose Democratic bona fides are about as profound as Hutchinson's Republican ones. Holt offered to help Williams, and the young Hutchinson, acting as a kind of campaign manager for his father-in-law, set up Holt as a consultant and steered him a few thousand dollars. I wrote a column concluding that Henry, who has several years of experience as a law clerk for this intermediate Court of Appeals, was reaching for nonpartisanship only to find herself "opposed by a cabal of Hutchinsons and Holtists." So I got an e-mail one day from someone helping Henry's campaign asking if the campaign could quote from this column. Why, sure, I said. It's in the public domain. It's there to be read and pondered as public discourse. You needn't have asked. Now comes a news release from Ronald Williams - well, from son-in-law Tim Jr., more to the point - decrying the "partisanship" by which Henry has put out a mailer accusing him of partisanship and enclosing that column I wrote. Let me run that by you again: Courtney Henry's campaign put out a pamphlet reproducing my column to accuse Ronald Williams of partisanship in a judge's race. Well, to apply full context, the pamphlet invoked the relationship with the extremist Holt to suggest possible judicial "radicalism" by Williams. Then Williams' campaign shot back by putting out a news release saying it was partisanship for Courtney Henry's campaign to put out that mailer accusing him of partisanship, incendiary as it was. That's all fine with me, except for this sentence in Williams' news release: "Ron Williams has not engaged in partisan politics." Hiring Jim Holt is not a partisan act? Not at all, says the young Tim Hutchinson. Candidates need consultants. They are entitled to hire them for professional services without having the political predilections of those consultants held against the candidate, Hutchinson tells me. He says that Holt, who supported eight kids on a legislative salary and expense account, saved Williams money on yard signs and printing. "I don't know how he does it," Hutchinson marvels. To be precise, hiring Holt was more a political ploy than partisan act. Holt has an extremist right-wing network that Williams would like to tap in a low-turnout primary against a popular Fayetteville candidate. Still, one way to characterize this choice for a supposedly nonpartisan judgeship is that it's between a candidate backed by John Paul Hammerschmidt and David Pryor, meaning Courtney Henry, and one backed by Jim Holt, meaning Ronald Williams. ------- 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. |
