Sarah risks rural distrust
Arkansas politics has always been about rural working-class distrust and resis- tance of government that seemed tone-deaf and full of itself.
For a small highway program in 1979, boy-wonder governor Bill Clinton went along with an idea to raise fees on motor vehicle licenses and title transfer fees.
It turned out that a lot of poor working people in Arkansas had a life cycle by which they frequently licensed vehicles and transferred titles. They routinely had a clunker break down, which required that they buy another clunker to keep them down the road, which required that they pay that higher fee to register a vehicle and transfer a title.
They tended to all that at the revenue office where a framed photo of the grinning blankety-blank boy wonder hung on the wall.
Clinton got beat in 1980 after a last-minute plea from the steps of the Mississippi County courthouse that the people not turn him out over car tags. He lost to a man named Frank White who said that it seemed to him that the only thing the people of Arkansas wanted was “a good lettin’ alone.”
Rural working-class distrust of government started moving rapidly the Republican way in Arkansas around 2010 soon after the Democrats elected a president named Barack Obama. He dared to advance the notion of mandating health insurance. One woman protested at the state Capitol with a sign demanding spectacular irony. Her sign read “Keep government out of my Medicare.”
She only thought she wanted a good lettin’ alone.
Somehow the garishly gold-plated Donald Trump appropriated this resentment and became a demigod in Arkansas.
His press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, came back to Arkansas to become governor with a message that she would protect our state’s rugged independence against the Democratic liberals. She railed monotonously against their frightful government of sex-change procedures and immigrants and teachers telling our innocent little white children that America hadn’t always been righteous toward Black people.
The question is whether she’s about to blow all that in the month of September 2023.
It may be that the month has revealed her big head. It may be that she has let a resourceful and snarky lawyer-blogger who calls himself the Blue Hog take residence in that big head.
Because the Blue Hog was fast at work making Freedom of Information Act requests about her spending, she called a ridiculous special legislative session that was partially failed even among what had formerly been her cowering rubber stamps in the Legislature.
One of them told me last week he didn’t know what the heck she was thinking.
Her main objective was to legalize her secrecy about spending taxpayer money— retroactively even.
When your constituent base is suspicious of government by nature, there would appear to be potential blowback in demanding retroactive secrecy about how much you’re spending to fly on the State Police airplane and lavish in “security services” provided to you and your family.
And then there is the $19,000 portable speaker’s stand.
Actually, it’s called a lectern and it cost only $18,000 and change. The rest was a $550 credit fee for buying this Dom Perignon of podiums in June on a state government credit card.
It also came with a carrying case, but any suggestion the governor paid the money two days before her European trade mission so that she could take the fancy speaker’s stand with her to Paris is, we’re officially told, the context-less nonsense of “radical-left keyboard warriors.”
Those were the words of the governor’s own press secretary, a woman who learned public relations skills in service to three of the least-liked people in contemporary politics— the smarmy Ted Cruz, the huffy Ron Johnson and the egomaniacal insurrectionist Trump.
The governor’s office has announced that it was an “accounting error” by which the state footed the bill.
It says the Republican Party reimbursed the state from spare private gubernatorial inauguration funds— this happening on Sept. 14 for this June 12 charge that the Blue Hog had found about on a state government website and through FOI requests and would post about on Sept. 15.
That’s all a coincidence, we’re advised, with any cover-up scenario merely the figment of the imaginations of radical-left keyboard warriors.
The lectern is said to be of “presidential” caliber, which, generic photographs suggest, would be of a svelte hourglass shape with a fancy seal and multiple-microphone hookups.
Speaker’s stand experts say such a lectern can get up to $18,000 based on the seal, the finest wood and even a bullet-proof material.
We’re told the lectern is not merely for Queen Sarah but also for use by the Republican Party or other Republican officeholders.
Perhaps, considering the travel case, the state GOP constitutional officers could pass it around for public display.
The Republican land commissioner—name escaping—could make the podium useful. He could place it outside his office’s first-floor Capitol corridor door to display an arrowed sign with valuable information relating “men’s bathroom that way.”