Common ground

A key to Arkansas’ best future

It’s the United States of America. It’s never been, and never will be, the United People of America. Name a time when this country’s people have been united politically. After 9/11, some will say, but that was unity in grief, mourning and, to a degree, a desire for retribution. But there were still Republicans and still Democrats and still disagreements over policy. The attacks, for a while, made most everyone more civil toward one another, more accepting of the fact we’re all Americans. We set differences aside for a while as the nation recovered and responded, but in the 21 years since, we snapped out of it, politically speaking.

Pearl Harbor? Certainly Americans joined forces in a common defense against our enemies, but World War II even brought the United States and the Soviet Union together in a shared purpose. Sometimes a unifier comes in the form of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Today’s societal and political divisions reflect a deep gulf between the country’s major political parties, and that’s a reflection of the population as a whole. As the Bible says about the poor, such divisions will always be with us. If you went back to the men who 246 years ago designed a political system that presupposes individual rights and freedoms, they would say dissent in the United States is a feature, not a bug.

The question is — and has been throughout the nation’s history — can Americans find the common ground necessary to deliver a productive future despite their differences? And if not all Americans, what about their leaders?

“It’s still a 50-50 country,” Mitch McConnell observed last week as he was reelected as the GOP leader in the U.S. Senate. “They’ve given us a 50-50 government again. I think what the public is going to be looking at is whether or not this narrowly divided Congress can accomplish anything that does them any good in terms of their lives.”

The longtime Kentucky politician suggested President Biden and Senate Democrats try to “find some things between the 40-yard lines that we can agree on and do them.”

Right back at you, Mitch, the Democrats might say. Takes two to tango (does anyone tango in Kentucky? Maybe, when they’re not clogging, which is rarely).

That is on the national scene. We’re as concerned, if not more so, about what happens right here in Arkansas. There’s already a tendency for the state’s politics to occasionally resemble the tug-of-war-like battles of Washington, D.C., but our small state cannot afford for its oars to be pulling in opposite directions. There’s too much to do and too much at stake as Arkansans work toward improving the state’s national stature on so many fronts. Forty-ninth (“Thank God for Mississippi!”) isn’t the full realization of the state’s potential, not by a long shot.

Gridlock is unlikely, as Republican super majorities grew in both chambers of the state Capitol and representation by Democrats shrank as a result of the Nov. 8 election. And any majority party might be tempted to simply ignore the people of Arkansas who — misguidedly in the GOP’s mind — choose Democrats to represent them.

The situation comes back to the same question: Is there common ground on which political leaders can make advances that the vast majority of Arkansans can feel good about?

Benton County’s Bart Hester, a senator since 2013, will take the reins as president pro tempore of the state Senate in January in a Legislature that has more Northwest Arkansas representatives than ever as a result of the region’s growing share of the state’s population. Here’s what he says constituents in Northwest Arkansas want:

“They want the Legislature to not make the national news,” he said, noting the region’s Fortune 500 companies and their continuing recruitment of employees to Northwest Arkansas. “When people outside the state go to Google and search for Northwest Arkansas, we want them to see stories about bike trails, safe streets and good jobs, not something the Legislature did.”

What does he mean? Hester can speak for himself, but it sounded to us that he’s interested in a Senate and House where real achievements advancing the state take precedence over headline-grabbing hot-button issues that create a lot of noise and stir people up, but ultimately have little to do with the state’s best future.

Hester, a staunch conservative, showed some leadership toward that kind of Legislature by (gasp!) sitting down with Sen. Greg Leding, progressive Democrat from what some in the GOP might view as the People’s Republic of Fayetteville.

“The Grand Canyon lies between Greg Leding and me politically, but we had lunch together,” Hester said while the Senate held a presession meeting in Little Rock recently.

It’s highly unlikely the two men will ever see eye to eye on a lot when it comes to public policy. But as Arkansans focused on Arkansas issues, the gap can undoubtedly be bridged sometimes if people from both sides decline to make villains out of their colleagues of the opposing persuasion.

Every lawmaker in Northwest Arkansas wants to see the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville thrive, Leding said. Every part of the region is affected by the university, by Northwest Arkansas National Airport, Northwest Arkansas Community College, growth issues and other matters of common interest, Leding said.

“You never know where you can get help from,” he said, encouraging colleagues to avoid partisan lines in the dirt. “Never assume anyone’s position on anything.”

The attitudes of both senators are encouraging. The people of Arkansas send just 135 elected representatives to the House and Senate. The state desperately needs them to be able to speak to one another and hear each other out.

There have been times when such a lunchtime meeting might have been avoided because a senator couldn’t be seen by his supporters being so congenial to “one of them.” It’s hard to imagine soon-gone lawmakers like Jason Rapert, Trent Garner or Bob Ballinger saying what Hester said. But Hester appears to know it’s not necessary to surrender one’s values to engage in a conversation with someone with whom you disagree. These folks need to be talking to each other primarily as lawmakers serving the people of the state, not Republicans or Democrats.

The departing Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, said in a recent interview that Americans sounded a similar clarion call in this month’s national midterm elections.

“I think the biggest issue that played out in the midterms is something I’ve talked about a lot over the course of the last eight years, which is voters, generally speaking, especially in battleground states, aren’t interested in extremism. … They want people who they believe are going to be reasonable, who are going to be collaborative and who represent sort of the fundamental tenet of democracy, that it’s supposed to be a distributed decision-making model and you’re supposed to be OK with that.”

Whether it’s in the Bay State or the Natural State, our leaders and their constituents should be OK with that.