A man with a plan
Arkansas Democrats are talking about their candidate for governor, Jared Henderson. And now the person Henderson most needs to talk about him—Gov. Asa Hutchinson—has deigned to engage him directly, with a little prodding from me.
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What Arkansas Democrats were saying last week was that, of the several presentations the weekend before at their annual Clinton Dinner in Little Rock, the best was Henderson’s.
He’s the 40-year-old former Teach for America director for Arkansas. From Springdale’s middle class, Henderson got advanced degrees from Harvard both in business administration and public administration. Then he worked for a time for NASA, and McKinsey and Co., the business management consultant firm that regularly taps the young elite.
Now he presumes to try to lead a new post-Clinton generation of Arkansas Democrats in a state gone red simple.
Having skipped out on the Clinton Dinner in Little Rock, I ventured Saturday to the annual Clark County Clinton Dinner at Henderson
State University in Arkadelphia. Henderson was the featured speaker. I beheld what Democrats had been talking about.
Henderson spoke commandingly and passionately about being an adopted child who got lucky. He said Arkansas had produced accomplishments all out of proportion to its size and relative economic status, such as globally elite companies, an American president, and cultural icons like Maya Angelou and Johnny Cash.
He took note that Arkansas had elected the first woman U.S. senator in Hattie Caraway and the youngest woman senator in Blanche Lincoln. His biggest applause line of the night came next: Maybe, in 2020, Arkansas would elect a woman to get rid of Tom Cotton in the U.S. Senate.
Henderson said a state that could do all of the aforementioned had no business putting up with ranking near-last in educational achievement and economic opportunity. He said the state needed only to expect more of itself.
That led him to invoke his big plan, or at least the first of his big plans, which he had announced midweek.
It is to forgo Hutchinson’s proposed tax cut for the highest income level and add to that sum all new collections in Internet sales taxes and unspecified reductions in prison spending. It is to use that pot of money on minimum Arkansas teacher salaries to raise them over 10 years to the highest in the country when adjusted for the cost of living.
Henderson was visionary, ambitious and mathematically specific except in the particulars of lowering prison costs, which he says will come next month by his campaign’s rollout schedule.
But his plan was not enough initially to draw the personal attention of Hutchinson. The governor’s chosen reply was a written statement from a campaign aide dismissing Henderson perfunctorily as yet another liberal with big tax-and-spend ideas.
Thus, the Democrat’s proposal got answered only by the incumbent’s proxy, and then by Arkansas Republicans’ tired and handy “liberal” crutch.
I invited the governor by text message the next day to engage Henderson and his idea personally. I asked him if higher teacher pay was a liberal notion.
I expected the governor wouldn’t respond other than to refer to his campaign aide’s previous banality. But, by the end of the next day, he had.
Hutchinson wrote: “I am an advocate of higher teacher pay and that is not liberal or conservative. It is simply a recognition of the importance of education and the role teachers have in moving our state toward excellence in education.
“Months ago, I announced a specific plan for increasing teacher pay. Other candidates will talk about education and I welcome their ideas to the table.
“However, it does reflect a liberal position when a candidate tries to take credit for a plan that he can’t get done in four years and it comes at the cost of reducing our budget for prisons, eliminating tax cuts and does not consider the other needs of the budget.”
It is true that a candidate for governor is seeking office for four years—and is limited to two elected terms—and could not see to fruition a 10-year plan. And it’s true a governor must stand ever-ready to revise his budget for revenue shortfalls or complications.
But I don’t know if liberal is the word for that. More a matter of vision than a practical certainty—that’s the better description.
Mike Beebe promised when running for governor to eliminate the sales tax on groceries. By the time he left office after eight years, his financially responsible drawdown had left intact a small fraction of the grocery tax. That didn’t discredit his campaign plan.
None of that changes what I heard Saturday night, which was a mildly stirring speech for a state that has produced more than its share of talent and exported entirely too much of it—and from talent that, in this case, has stayed home.