Defeat is victory
Already in love with newspapers, I would race to the driveway of my family home as a boy in the late 1960s, still wearing my pajamas as I picked up that morning’s edition of the Arkansas Gazette. I would go to the sports section first, reading what Jim Bailey had to say about the Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference teams (I lived in an AIC town) and what Orville Henry had to say about the Razorbacks.
I eventually would turn to the news pages as my love of politics grew. I would read about Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, the native New Yorker who had come to Arkansas and become the first Republican governor of the state since Reconstruction. As a boy, I never knew anyone who identified himself or herself as a Republican. You just didn’t do that in Clark County. As I became a teenager (Democrats had regained the governor’s office by that point) and started thinking about politics, I determined that two-party competition would be healthy.
By the time I was old enough to cast my first votes in 1978, the brief Republican revival spurred by Rockefeller was already a distant memory. It was a foregone conclusion that the state’s young attorney general, Democrat Bill Clinton, would be elected governor. Still, I cast my vote that November for the Republican nominee, Lynn Lowe of Texarkana. By 1980, I was a confirmed Republican. Not only did I vote for Ronald Reagan that November,
I also voted for Frank White, figuring he had no chance to beat Clinton.
On the morning of the 1980 election,
Hal Bass, my political science professor, gave me 30 minutes to explain to a class why Reagan would be elected president while he took the other half of class to explain why President Jimmy Carter would be re-elected. I tried to maintain a professional on-air demeanor that night as I anchored election coverage on the two Arkadelphia radio stations, but was privately elated as I ripped copy from the wire machine and saw that Reagan was on his way to victory. Even more amazing was that White pulled an epic upset in the governor’s race.
By 1984, I was working full time in my first Republican campaign. It wasn’t a successful effort, as Judy Petty of Little Rock failed to win her congressional race against the Democratic sheriff of Pulaski County, the mercurial Tommy Robinson. Frank White, who had served a mere two years as governor before losing to Clinton in 1982, was Petty’s neighbor, and I would visit with him about the state of Arkansas politics after dropping Petty off at her home. I knew most of the active Republicans in the state in those days by their first names. There were very few of us around. I can assure you that the majority of the angry old men who will call me a RINO (Republican In Name Only) after reading this column were voting in the Democratic primary back then.
I served as the Arkansas Democrat’s Washington correspondent for most of the rest of the decade, but politics called again in late 1989 when the chairman of the Republican National Committee convinced me to go to work for Robinson’s campaign for governor. Robinson had switched to the GOP earlier that year. I figured I was finished with politics after Robinson lost. I was 31 years old, and it was time to return to journalism.
What followed was more than five blissful years as editor of Arkansas Business and political editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. I wasn’t looking to work in government in July 1996 when Mike Huckabee called and asked if I would join his senior management team beginning on the day he took office—July 15, 1996. The offer to be part of a new administration was too intriguing to turn down.
I thought it would be a short detour into government. It wound up being 13 years—nine in the governor’s office and four in the administration of President George W. Bush as one of the president’s two appointees to the Delta Regional Authority. I even took a nine-month leave in 1998 to serve as the campaign manager for Huckabee as he sought a full four-year term after serving out the remainder of Gov. Jim Guy Tucker’s term. We won with almost 60 percent of the vote, a stunning accomplishment for a Republican in Arkansas at the time.
I look back with pride on those 13 years. All leaders make mistakes, and Huckabee and Bush made some. Both, however, are good men who had empathy for those they served, a stark contrast to the current president. Huckabee and Bush governed as pragmatists, always willing to work with members of the other party to get things done. I left their administrations with my respect still intact for those men.
Two weeks ago, Bush narrated a three-minute video that was so well done that I quickly posted it to my Facebook page. Peter Wehner, who worked in the Bush White House, described the video this way in an essay for The Atlantic: “He expressed gratitude to health-care workers, encouraged Americans to abide by social distancing rules and reminded his fellow Americans that we have faced trying times before.”
Bush said: ‘Empathy and simple kindness are essential, powerful tools of national recovery . . . . Remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat. In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants; we are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.” President Donald Trump responded in the only way he knows how to this message of hope and solidarity. He attacked Bush on Twitter as being “nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!”
“Think about that for a minute,” wrote Wehner, now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a visiting professor at Duke University. “George W. Bush made a moving, eloquent plea for empathy and national unity, which enraged Donald Trump enough that he felt the need to go on the attack.”
Iyearn for the return of the Republican Party that I was attracted to all those decades ago. We’re fortunate that Asa Hutchinson governs in the same pragmatic, moderate style as his predecessors. I wince only when Hutchinson feels compelled to defend Trump, though it’s evident there’s no enthusiasm when he does so. The only hope for building a true conservative party in this country is for Trump to lose in November so the GOP is forced to rebuild. In this sense, defeat will be victory as the party retreats from the nativist politics that attract the kind of characters who dress in camouflage and carry rifles outside state capitols. These sad men, carrying signs riddled with misspellings, could never cut it as real soldiers.
The transformation of Arkansas to a Republican state, which began in earnest in the 2010 election cycle, is complete. Republicans likely will be this state’s majority party for the rest of my lifetime. I hope, in what’s supposed to be a state with a part-time citizen Legislature, they’ll be thoughtful, pragmatic business owners and civic leaders rather than opportunists whose meager legislative salaries represent the majority of their income. There’s already more of the latter than any of us care to admit. The defeat of Trump this November and the resulting reconstruction of the Republican Party will help ensure that more of the former win GOP primaries in the years ahead.
I agree with Wehner when he writes: “We are witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of an American president. It’s something the Trump White House cannot hide — indeed, it doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. There is not even the slightest hint of normalcy. This will have ongoing ramifications for the remainder of Trump’s first term and form his re-election strategy. More than ever, Trump will try to convince Americans that ‘what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,’ to quote his own words in 2018. … It’s all he has left, so Americans have to prepare for it. Trump and his apparatchiks will not only step up their propaganda; they will increase their efforts to exhaust our critical thinking and to annihilate truth.”
Because of Rockefeller, the Arkansas Republican Party has a different heritage than GOP operations in other Southern states. Hutchinson continues to govern in that manner, yet I worry about the future. Trump’s defeat in November will force the party to do the necessary soul searching. His hostile takeover of the GOP in 2016 will always be a sordid part of our history, but it doesn’t have to be a part of the future.