When politics was noble
We had an occasion the other evening to recall a healthier time in politics way back in the early 2010s.
We were gathered at the Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock’s River Market for an advance screening of a biographical documentary on Mike Beebe, governor from January 2007 to January 2015.
In those days—pre-hideousness—a personable, skilled, highly articulate, biographically rich, socially moderate and fiscally conservative Democratic governor who believed above all else in making government work could toil effectively with a Republican Legislature.
He could lead and lend credit to others to get accomplished a large and innovative thing like expanding Medicaid under Obamacare to a quarter-million people but in a privatized—i.e., conservatized—way.
This governor didn’t tweet. He had a big ego, for sure. That’s a theme of the documentary. But his was an ego revealing itself mostly in a shirtsleeved swagger, not in childish ridicule of anyone who dared to behave without abject adoration for him.
Directed by Arkansas Cinema Society founder Kathryn Tucker of Little
Rock, this engaging film captures well Beebe’s personality and character. It will be broadcast on AETN at 7 p.m. Thursday and get shown on the public television network randomly thereafter.
Perhaps you remember Beebe’s general biography. He was born in a tar-paper shack in a basically nonexistent place on a Northeast Arkansas road called Amagon. He was the son of an unwed mother and waitress who took her boy to Detroit and back, marrying a few times.
Families in Newport helped raise young Mickey Dale along the way toward graduation from Arkansas State University and to the law review editorship at the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville. He joined a politically connected law firm in Searcy, won a record judgment in a wrongful-death lawsuit, and ventured into politics to become a 20-year state senator who pretty much ran that upper chamber as a natural leader to whom young moderate Democratic colleagues were drawn.
Then he became governor, got re-elected by carrying all 75 counties, and shepherded state government through a national recession for eight successful years.
Now he plays golf in Searcy and serves on a couple of boards that send planes for him. People suggest him as a political candidate again, as a U.S. senator, and he scoffs.
He can’t imagine himself the low man in a Democratic caucus led by Chuck Schumer in a stalemated Senate. He likes getting things done way too much for that.
From a shack in Amagon to the Governor’s Mansion was all the intergalactic travel he’d ever need.
His confirmed pragmatism made modernday Arkansas Democrats mad just a few months ago when he got asked about Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s work requirement for Medicaid. He replied that, hey, you do what you have to do to save the policy.
He said let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good, which means not let the left and the right destroy the center, which is precisely what’s now happening.
Beebe now ventures to Little Rock only for rare events, such as the premiere of a film that he admitted afterward was a little “soapy” even for his taste a time or two.
The film is sufficiently adoring that even Donald Trump would approve except when a local columnist tempers the fandom only a little, mainly to try to compensate for his poorly disguised affection and regard.
From the beginning of his political career, Beebe seemed to live by the example of the two men he most admired. One was John F. Kennedy for his charm and eloquence. The other was Dale Bumpers, who appointed a 27-year-old Beebe to the board of ASU and always said his daddy taught him that politics was a noble profession.
Beebe represents the generational termination of JFK’s New Frontier and Bumpers’ era of modernization and moderate progressivism in Arkansas. And the generational moment was not on lost on Beebe as he spoke briefly to the audience after the film.
It’s time, he said, to pass the torch in the way JFK took it from those who passed it to him.
Baby boomers took the torch proudly and ran with it elegantly and in high stride. Beebe said everyone in the theater could be proud of leaving Arkansas a better place.
He said he didn’t know how it had happened, but that the nobility of politics had been lost to cynicism.
Somehow, boomers tripped over their own feet. Now they deliver to the coming generation a damaged flicker representing hope that mustn’t die.
It won’t happen, but I couldn’t help wondering how a Beebe challenge next year to U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton would turn out in our Trump-decayed contemporary Arkansas.
It’s probably fortunate to that flicker of hope that I won’t find out.