A different heritage

The crowd in the Great Hall of the Clinton Presidential Center on a Thursday evening earlier this fall consisted in part of what I refer to as “the usual suspects.” These are the people I see on a regular basis for lectures here and at the adjacent Clinton School of Public Service.

On this night, they had gathered to hear Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields from the University of Arkansas talk about their book The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.

Maxwell is the director of the Diane Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the university and an associate professor of political science. Shields is dean of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Here’s how Dahlia Lithwick, a senior legal correspondent for Slate, describes their book: “For as long as we have been thinking about the Southern strategy, most have considered it largely through the lens of race, slavery and the legacy of the Civil War on Southern cultural identity. But Maxwell and Shields reveal that what we think of as a time-limited, race focused effort to court Southern voters in the 1970s and 1980s was, in fact, a strategy carried on in two important and unexplored wings—gender anxiety and religious fervor—and packaged in Southern flavors.

“This deeply researched, broadly drawn argument about the ways in which the Republican Party rebranded to appeal to and inflame those anxieties will become crucial to our understanding of the long history of Southern politics, and to reckoning with our current political climate, which remains trapped under the unfinished fallout from the Civil War.”

“The usual suspects” at these events tend to be well educated, well read and relatively articulate. They also tend to be Democrats, some of them in the most pretentious kind of way.

“Can you give us any hope?” my friend Herb Rule, a former Democratic candidate for the state’s 2nd Congressional District seat, asked at one point.

Never mind the fact that several of us in the audience didn’t consider ourselves a part of the “us” to which Rule referred. Maxwell, who did most of the talking, is a highly partisan Democrat. But she’s also a serious scholar, and I found the book interesting.

“Donald Trump’s victories both in the GOP primaries and in the general election come with expectations from many of his voters,” Maxwell and Shields write. “Winning, they think, should silence the accusations of racism, sexism, ignorance or hate that have been lobbed their way— accusations that are anything but new in the white South. But it has not. That, in turn, has amped up the denial and resentment for many. …

“Their righteousness needs validation, which is why the partisan screen and fake news proliferate, and why political correctness, which is seen as endorsing the liberal worldview, has become the new enemy. But righteousness only needs validation when it is based on manufactured threats or false equivalencies or orchestrated outrage or bogus notions of supremacy.”

The thing I found curious about the evening is that there was virtually no discussion of how different the GOP heritage in Arkansas is from that of states in the Deep South.

That same lack of context showed up in a guest column published earlier this month on the Voices page of this newspaper. The author of the column, a retired University of Arkansas at Little Rock psychology professor named Roger Webb, noted that he had watched what Republicans “did in Memphis” during his college years from 1960-64.

I could tell by reading the column that he wasn’t in Arkansas during those years. Had he been here, he would have known that the race baiting came from Democrats. Orval Faubus had ridden his segregationist stand at Little Rock Central High School in 1957 to a third term in 1958, a fourth term in 1960, a fifth term in 1962 and a sixth term in 1964. And Faubus, more of a political opportunist than a hater, seemed almost moderate compared to the true segregationist firebrands in his party.

It was Republican Winthrop Rockefeller (who ran an unsuccessful campaign against Faubus in 1964) and his band of followers, a number of whom were black, who were making a stand against the racism and outright corruption that marked Arkansas Democratic politics at the time. It’s impossible to understand Arkansas politics without studying the Rockefeller legacy. He fled to Arkansas in 1953 as a desperately unhappy man who felt he couldn’t live up to his family name.

“He chaffed at the restrictive lifestyle expected of him and his siblings,” Arkansas historian Tom Dillard wrote. “A heavy drinker known for his playboy lifestyle, Rockefeller often frequented chic cafes late at night with a movie star on his arm. He abruptly married an attractive blonde divorcee named Barbara ‘Bobo’ Sears on Valentine’s Day in 1948. Soon they were the parents of a son, Winthrop Paul Rockefeller, but the marriage dissolved within a year.”

Rockefeller didn’t allow himself to be deterred by the 1964 loss to Faubus. He ran again in 1966, and Faubus decided not to seek a seventh term. Rockefeller defeated Democratic nominee Jim Johnson to become the first Republican since Reconstruction to be elected governor. In 1968, Rockefeller won re-election against Marion Crank, a member of the so-called Old Guard of the Democratic Party. Rockefeller was the first 20th-century Southern governor to appoint blacks to high-level positions and was the only Southern governor to stand with civil rights leaders following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The GOP victories in 1966 and 1968 forced Arkansas Democrats to change direction. After a four-year hiatus, Faubus thought he would be welcomed with open arms when he ran for governor in 1970. Instead, he lost to Dale Bumpers in the Democratic primary. Bumpers then beat Rockefeller in the fall. It took a Rockefeller and a resurgent Arkansas GOP to force the majority party to change. It was Rockefeller who made Bumpers, David Pryor and Bill Clinton possible.

In the spring of 1996, in my role as the political editor of this newspaper, I interviewed an aging George Wallace in Montgomery, Ala. He was the kind of demagogue I once thought of when I thought of Democrats. As a boy in Arkansas, Republicans were the ones who represented change.

Soon after that Wallace interview, I joined new Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee as his director of policy and communications. That fall, I accepted an invitation to speak to the Political Animals Club of Northwest Arkansas and was verbally attacked by three well-known women who couldn’t stand the thought of a Republican living in the governor’s mansion. Democrats were consoling themselves by calling Huckabee “the accidental governor,” thinking he would only serve the remaining two years of Gov. Jim Guy Tucker’s term.

Huckabee had ascended to the governor’s office when Tucker resigned following his conviction on felony charges in federal court. Huckabee went on to become the third longest-serving governor in Arkansas history (behind Faubus and Clinton). He proved to be a pragmatic, moderate chief executive.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who’s in his second four-year term, has been just as pragmatic and moderate. Huckabee and Hutchinson have governed in the Rockefeller mode, not in a Trumpian fashion. Huckabee still enjoyed high public approval ratings when his more than a decade as governor ended, and Hutchinson is among the most popular governors in the country.

Much to the chagrin of partisan Democrats who would like to face candidates they could beat, the Arkansas GOP (at least at the highest levels) remains different.