A great governor
Mayor Frank Scott got to talking the other day, as he is inclined and capable. He introduced Gov. Asa Hutchinson to the Downtown Little Rock Rotary Club and ended up saying Asa would get recorded as a great governor along with Scott’s old boss, Mike Beebe.
Liberals and partisan Democrats are aghast, but Scott’s statement was less pulpit hyperbole than truth.
The only argument against Scott’s declaration would be grounded in ideology and partisanship rather than in demonstrated accomplishment, competence and responsibility.
A governor you usually disagree with is not the same as a bad governor. And vice versa. That goes for any major executive office, such as president.
I can usually disagree with a governor and sometimes find his words despicable, yet still proclaim such a governor—I’m talking about Mike Huckabee here—a great one historically.
Huckabee embraced ARKids First and, confronted with the seminal Lake View ruling declaring inadequacy and inequality in public education, pushed through the largest tax increase in state history and managed to effect modest school consolidation.
Extending health insurance to Arkansas kids who also get a better chance at a quality chemistry or algebra class no matter where they live—that’s a more defining legacy than spouting silly right-wing jargon, as Huckabee was incurably prone.
Beebe was a great governor because he steered the state expertly through a national economic crisis and adapted smartly to get Medicaid expansion approved by a Republican Legislature. But he was positively backward on gay issues.
In a valedictory interview with him, I tried hard to get Beebe to say what I suspected to be true, which was that he had no quarrel with same-sex marriage. He wouldn’t say it.
That means he was a great governor who was horribly wrong on an
important cultural issue of his time, even as he appointed gays to major positions such as the state Board of Education.
I agreed with Jimmy Carter, but I fully know he was a bad president. I abhorred the tax and economic policies of Ronald Reagan, but I know he was a great president. His administration imposed pervasive conservative values on a generation.
That Reaganism devolved to Donald Trump’s presidency was not Reagan’s fault. It was the fault of a global economy, a dash of Obama-hating racism, a revulsion toward Hillary Clinton and festering working-class resentments stemming as much from Bill Clinton’s NAFTA and George W. Bush’s Wall Street meltdown as from Reagan’s misbegotten trickle-down notions.
Am I saying Trump might go down as a great president because of the economic performance? Of course not. I referred earlier not only to accomplishment, but competence and responsibility.
Trump diminishes the office and nation by hideously unprincipled and low-brow behavior. He will leave the country decidedly worse even if he departs the presidency with an unemployment rate of zero-point-zero.
His legacy will be to leave the nation in need of a shower.
But this column is about Hutchinson, who has reorganized state government as extensively and admirably as Dale Bumpers’ reorganization in 1971. He has reduced income-tax rates at all levels to the point that, for the moment, Arkansas does not have the highest rates in its region. He has paced the tax reductions in such a cautious way that the state continues to run efficiently and produce surpluses. He has artfully saved Medicaid expansion even if saving it encompassed a raw political ploy to propose a nonsensical work requirement that a federal court has thus far blessedly stopped.
He has advanced computer coding in a way that has Arkansas at least trying to keep pace if not gain ground in the digital economy. He has moderated the more fringe-right tendencies of his own party on gay rights versus religious rights, on a holiday solely celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and in his as-yet inconsequential agreement that the state flag should no longer commemorate the Confederacy. He toned down an NRA bill for guns everywhere to allow guns nearly everywhere.
It is true that Hutchinson advances a road program that places a higher proportionate burden on low-income motorists. But as long as we rely on user-financed highways and gasoline, I’m not sure how we institute progressive tax rates at the pump.
It also is true that the state has had major legislative corruption during both the Beebe and Hutchinson governorships. But that’s not the governors’ fault. The Legislature is an independent branch. It’s to these governors’ credit they have avoided the stench and managed to get decent policies passed through an otherwise corrupt body.
One way for liberals and Democratic partisans to consider the Hutchinson governorship is to ponder whether they’ll miss Asa when he’s replaced by Sarah Huckabee, Tim Griffin or Leslie Rutledge.
I discount any Democratic chances as long as rural Arkansas voters fear that Nancy Pelosi will turn us into San Francisco and that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will confiscate our pickups and assign us electric subcompacts.