Mixing marriage and state

About all I could add with certainty to the story of the odd and abrupt firing of Mike Mills as the top official of the state Parks, Heritage and Tourism agency is that governors’ spouses can be a problem.

Nobody elected them. But the gov- ernors the people did elect tend to love their spouses and defer to them, perhaps even to be cowed by them.

Hillary Clinton escaped with near-universal popularity as her husband’s appointee to draft new state education standards. Over time, though, she became a lightning rod.

Once when a legislative session went into the night, she came by after a day of lawyering downtown and started barking orders, including that bills to remove certain business tax exemptions long since defeated get brought back up while key legislators and lobbyists were possibly into happy hour. Bill could have said, honey, let’s not do that. He didn’t. There were near-fights on the House floor, and the maneuver failed, of course.

I still personally object to Hillary’s ambushing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom McRae at a news conference while Bill was out of state. She told me that she didn’t give up her constitutional right of free expression by being wed to the governor. I wasn’t talking about constitutional rights. I was talking about governors fighting their own battles and their spouses not being rude by shouting, “oh, Tom, give me a break” in the middle of an opponent’s news conference in the Capitol rotunda.

I don’t know if Mike Huckabee was pleased about wife Janet’s hauling off and running for secretary of state while he was governor. I do know that 62 percent of the voters weren’t, even as 53 percent voted on the same ballot to keep him as governor.

Think about all those Arkansans voting for the husband for governor and against the wife for secretary of state. I suggest that they felt the state needn’t pick a third of the statewide constitutional officers from one bed.

I remember Asa Hutchinson’s staying the heck out of his wife Susan’s insistence on wresting from a commission the interior decorating control of the Governor’s Mansion, including the selection of a $1,000 public toilet, which the sophisticated tell me is not terribly high.

But here’s the thing: Smart politics is avoiding the appearance of extravagance, especially in Arkansas. Smart husbanding, which is more important, is staying out of fabric choices and commode prices.

So, in recent days we’ve had a fairly big state-government story: Popular Arkansas outdoors figure Mike Mills, appointed by Gov. Sarah Sanders to run Parks, Heritage and Tourism, sent an email to the chief of staff of first husband Bryan Sanders seeking an audience with Sarah to talk about closing a few state parks. For that, he got called to the governor’s office and fired.

There is much to unwrap but, as long as Mills isn’t talking, I can’t do that unwrapping.

But I can tell you this much: The first thing that jumps out of that news item is that a state agency director went through a “chief of staff” to the guy married to the governor—and elected to nothing—to seek a meeting on his state-government responsibilities with the governor.

Here’s the heck of that: Sarah has created an advisory group on all matters of Arkansas tourism and recreation and put her husband in charge of it on an unpaid basis (though his “chief of staff” is paid well through the governor’s-office payroll, more than other state-agency liaisons.)

The first gentleman looms on the real organizational chart as czar of all Arkansas outdoors, putting him just below the governor and above the governor’s cabinet.

I offer only moderately informed speculation that the outdoor czar didn’t care for Mills even before Mills dared to think for himself and inconvenience the wife-governor’s vaunted message control by raising an issue of closing state parks, thus risking headlines Sarah had not personally directed.

What I’m more solidly convinced of is that Bryan Sanders is a Republican political pollster-consultant by trade, one of some high regard, and ought to go do that. Some political conflicts or appearances thereof with his wife’s governorship might arise, but they’d be easier than trying to run a state agency by mixing marriage and state.

In other matters, the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees will have a special meeting Monday. Trustee Sheffield Nelson sent an email to fellow board members Wednesday seeking an executive session on the end-of-year contract extension of Don Bobbitt, the UA system president.

Nelson’s email accuses Bobbitt of secrecy in that ill-fated attempt to absorb the poorly regarded University of Phoenix online entity. It even suggests Bobbitt was angling for a position with the third party set up actually to acquire Phoenix in the UA’s behalf.

I’m advised the board has four votes devoted to Bobbitt, four weary of him and two not certain but not ready to part ways with him.

What I don’t understand is why it’s not logically time to separate from a longtime president whose last two signature initiatives—the chancellor selection at the Fayetteville flagship and the Phoenix proposal—were rejected by the board.