An interesting weekend
If the Arkansas Democratic Party could ever hope to offer anything interesting in the state’s Trump-devoted and ragingly red environment, this weekend would be the time.
Buried by Republican landslide within and abandoned by Democratic leftism without, the beleaguered Democrats will put on a three-day series of events called a Summer Gathering. It will begin with a reception Thursday night and end with the Clinton Day dinner Saturday night.
—————— Stacey Abrams, conceivably the next governor of Georgia, in which case she would be the nation’s first black female governor, will speak Thursday night.
A mere 44, she is a businesswoman and Yale-educated lawyer who became minority leader of the state Legislature. She is a liberal who doesn’t run from it, as white male Democratic candidates have been prone in the South.
She can tell a personal story that threatens to forge a human connection transcending a wedge issue or two in an evolving state like Georgia, where Barack Obama came within six points in 2008.
There is the story as related in Time magazine about Abrams’ college-educated dad who had to settle for Mississippi work at a shipyard, and who sometimes left the family’s one car at home for the others. On a frigid night while walking home from work, he gave his coat to a homeless man, and wound up half-frozen himself by the side of the road. The family came looking for him, and upon finding him in such a perilous state, asked why in the world he’d given away his coat. He said it was because the man needed it and he knew his loved ones would come for him.
It happens that Georgia Republicans nominated for governor the other day a Trumpian blowhard extremist—but I repeat myself—who ran television commercials cocking his gun, rope-starting his chainsaw and climbing into his pickup while saying he just might round up some illegal immigrants and toss them in the back.
Evolving Georgia might be growing weary of its right wing. One of its Republican state legislators—and you’re going to think I’m making this up—just got spoofed beyond the outer limits of gullibility by Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat and Bruno fame on Showtime’s Who is America?
Basically, Cohen uses this program to trick Americans into showing how stupid they are.
This dreadful state representative, named Jason Spencer, dropped both his outer and inner pants on camera (because it scares away Muslim terrorists who fear homosexuality, Cohen-in-disguise convinced him) and yelled the “n” word (which distracts Muslim terrorists, the Cohen character explained).
The tragic creature— Spencer, not Cohen—resigned last week.
Meanwhile, back in the world of the sane: The speaker for Saturday night’s Clinton Dinner will be a Democratic governor of a red state who got re-elected in 2016 while Trump was carrying his state by an Arkansas-like margin of 21 points.
His name is Steve Bullock. The state is Montana, where a Republican congressional candidate bodyslammed a reporter one day for asking him about health care and got elected the next.
The 52-year-old Bullock is Montana’s Mike Beebe, sort of, except younger and progressive on gay rights. He is a Columbia Law School graduate who served as attorney general before becoming governor to work with a Republican super-majority in the Legislature. He’s managed to get Medicaid expansion approved and to sustain a few vetoes.
Some of us believe that the base-obsession and identity-politics emphasis of the national Democratic Party is shortsighted, and that Democrats need not to abandon but reach out to the central and mountain time zones. Some people feeling that way find Bullock … interesting, let’s say at this point, at least in my case, failing my laying eyes on him or hearing him speak.
Just the other day, Bullock ascended to the chairmanship of the National Governors Association. His circumstance and path kind of remind one of Bill Clinton, a Democratic governor of a Reagan state who did a stint as chairman of the NGA on his way to the presidency.
Bullock is a close acquaintance of former Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, a rising Democratic star in Arkansas before personal indiscretion and, more to the point, Republican transformation. They met through the national Democratic attorneys’ general organization. It was McDaniel who persuaded Bullock to come to Arkansas, hardly a target state for someone pondering a run for the Democratic presidential nomination—as Bullock presumably is.
He just lined up a trip Aug. 24-25 to New Hampshire.
All of that is to say it’s not a bad lineup for the lowly Arkansas Democrats—Abrams on Thursday to check all the existing Democratic boxes and Bullock to come in Saturday and suggest bringing back a couple of old boxes for checking.
This is not exactly what lethargy normally looks like.