Berry-pickin’ time

House Speaker Jeremy Gillam, the blackberry farmer from White County, was on his phone as he stepped into the coffee shop in midtown.

He was counseling his Revenue and Taxation Committee chairman— Democrat Joe Jett—on the best timing for certain matters of committee business.

Yes, you noticed correctly: The Republican speaker of the historically remade Republican chamber in this seismically reddened state had bestowed chairmanship of an important committee on a Democrat.

And he was chatting intimately with that Democratic lieutenant as he ambled over to visit with the left-leaning columnist for the newspaper.

This Jeremy Gillam—a genuinely conservative old boy—has quickly shown himself to be a seriously talented consensus-builder.

He is a natural conciliator. He leads by a commanding niceness. He is a practitioner of a refreshing kind of politics driven not at all by partisan or philosophical stridence, but by personal relationships in pursuit of pragmatic solutions.

He is a conservative canvas with utter practicality drawn all over it.

Gillam told me about being at a national conference and hearing Karen Hughes, former adviser to George W. Bush, say, “You can’t retweet nuance.” He wishes he’d thought of that—of a clever line, itself quite retweetable, to describe that governing is all about conceding the simplicity of campaign rhetoric to the complexities of issues and process.

He and I had met at this coffee shop shortly before Christmas. He said at the time that he thought the forthcoming session would go smoothly.

I countered that the session would amount to a melee at risk of a meltdown. I cited the unbridged gap between establishment Republicans and Tea Party Republicans over the private-option form of Medicaid expansion.

So there Gillam sat with a mug of hot chocolate. It was a mere month into a session already unprecedented for expeditious, front-loaded resolution of big issues—tax cuts and that very private option, which would pass the House the next day after Gillam’s personal plea from the well of the House for “trust.”

And he was talking about maybe adjourning this session by spring break, after 75 days or so.

He was describing a session now almost an anti-climax, devoted for the balance of time to budget bills and dealing with the inevitable firestorms— the King-Lee holiday, an attempt to abandon Common Core testing and surely something we haven’t thought of yet.

He said he’d told members to present their bills right away rather than hold them for an April stretch run. He has in mind a March stretch run.

It’s the berry farmer in him. As he explains, berry-farming fortunes come down to being ready to move quickly to pick the berries when they announce their fast-fleeting ripeness.

Gillam leads the House like the berries are ripe.

In early January, Gillam met with reporters assembled by The Associated Press and said he thought the session could be completed in 85 days. He said the tax cut and private option could be dealt with back-to-back off the top.

He told me he saw reporters and pundits looking at him condescendingly, as if he were a naïve farm boy soon to learn about real politics in the city.

We the pundits were utterly wrong. He was wholly correct.

The difference is that we the pundits were dealing in stereotype and superficiality while he was establishing personal relationships and imploring new legislators to put their opening focus on the biggest issues and learn fast. He told freshmen not to try to learn everything at once, but to learn Medicaid first.

There was one other thing he knew that we didn’t. It was that Gov. Asa Hutchinson was preparing to make a speech on the private option by which he would, at once, give its defenders the opportunity to vote to save it and its detractors the opportunity to vote to kill it.

Thus the private-option fight is being deferred until formulation next year and a real donnybrook in 2017.

Gillam presumably will be gone as the House leader in 2017. He will have picked his berries.

Or maybe not. The new term-limits amendment allows him to run for the House again. Presumably he could seek the speakership again.

Doing so might seem arrogant and power-hungry in someone else. But Gillam might be able to aw-shucks his way through it. In fact, I think it’s a fine idea. How do you like them berries?