OPINION
God, Jason Rapert and Obamacare
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hen someone lamented the starvation of millions in the Ukraine, Joseph Stalin is supposed to have observed that “one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is only a statistic.” Stalin’s point is an apt one. We may find one person’s hardships compelling, but our compassion tends to dissolve in the face of an abstraction like “50 million.” The legislature’s huge vote — 28-7 in the Senate and 77-19 in the House — to provide government-paid health insurance for 250,000 low-income working adults and implement a law that people in Arkansas are supposed to loathe is the most shocking turnaround in modern Arkansas history. Democratic Gov. Dale Bumpers corralled three-fourths of both legislative houses in 1971 for the only increase in the personal income tax in history, but all except four of the 135 lawmakers belonged to Bumpers’ party. Here we have Republicans controlling both houses
of the legislature. Except for a few ideas for slowing medical inflation, the Affordable Care Act has a ERNEST single purpose, to DUMAS provide insurance to the 50 million Americans — 504,200 of them in Arkansas — who don’t have it, principally because they can’t afford it or they are denied it by insurance companies. The Republican case was that it was more Big Government, and it seemed that at least half the country was with them. That 50 million and Arkansas’s 504,200 might be down and out but they were part of Mitt Romney’s famous 47 percent who were takers, slackers and whiners. Across the South and Midwest, where Republicans were in control, they took advantage of the one opening the U.S. Supreme Court gave them for disrupting Obamacare. That was to deny health
Pryor should thank Bloomberg
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n the unlikely event that Mark Pryor wins re-election as Arkansas’s senior U.S. senator in 2014, he should send New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg a thank-you gift. Something like a sugary 44 ounce Big Gulp or a case of Dr. Pepper. Offering His Honor a 30-06 deer rifle would be churlish. Unlike liberal groups who scared up a primary opponent for former Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010, predictably helping her lose to a cookie-cutter GOP conservative, Bloomberg’s group Mayors Against Illegal Guns has given the beleaguered Democrat, well, a target to shoot at. Angered with Pryor’s Senate vote against broadening background checks for gun sales—one of four Democrats to do so — Mayors Against Illegal Guns has been running TV ads in Arkansas citing the murder of state Democratic Party chair Bill Gwatney by a deranged gunman in 2008. Narrated by former Democratic Party official Angela Bradford-Barnes, the commercial expresses the disgust of just about every Arkansas Democrat I know with what they saw as Pryor’s cowardly vote. “The Caspar Milquetoast of Arkansas politics,” one acerbic columnist dubbed him. “When my dear innocent friend was shot
to death, I didn’t blame guns,” Bradford-Barnes says, “I blamed a system that makes it so terribly easy for criminals or GENE the dangerous menLYONS tally ill to buy guns.” Pryor has said that he found the politicizing of his friend’s murder “disgusting.” Maybe he did. Tactically speaking, the problem with the Bloomberg ad is that just about every Democrat I know lives either in Hillcrest, basically the Upper West Side of Little Rock, or in the college town of Fayetteville — completely atypical of Arkansas voters generally. They can be as disgusted as they like. But they have exactly nowhere to go. Blanche Lincoln carried Hillcrest handily against Rep. John Boozman in 2010. She lost statewide 58 to 37 percent. President Obama also carried Pulaski County (Little Rock) in 2010; Mitt Romney won Arkansas by 24 points. So you can see Pryor’s dilemma. Meanwhile, the billionaire-coddling Club for Growth (or “Club for Greed” as former Gov. Mike Huckabee once called it) has also been hammering the Arkansas Demo-
insurance to a large group of Americans who were eligible for Medicaid, the statefederal program for the poor and disabled. Only the Arkansas legislature didn’t oblige, although one or two other Republican legislatures may follow. Forty-two of the 72 Republican lawmakers and all the Democrats voted for it. Governor Beebe, a Democrat, gets credit for his deft hand, patience and occasional sellout on outrageous Republican bills, and credit must go also to community hospitals, doctors and business groups that pleaded that the state not reject a big economic stimulus. But there was another element. The governor’s office, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and the Arkansas Community Institute found faces to humanize those big impersonal numbers. Faye Graham of North Little Rock was one of them. Graham, 54, is the only person in three generations of her cancerprone family to have survived it, and she is still battling. A teacher and educational consultant who reared four children and saw them through Yale and Wellesley, she has at times been homeless and dependent on her children and friends. She can’t get a full-time job but she earns about $16,000
a year teaching a class at Pulaski Technical College and tutoring adult illiterates and ACT test takers. She lost the insurance that paid for her treatment and scans and all that is available is the temporary Obamacare plan for people with pre-existing conditions. The premiums would be $15,000 a year and it would cover only 80 percent of costs if she could afford it. Graham spoke at a Capitol rally and legislative hearings, and several Republican legislators found Graham and her story compelling. Gracious, articulate and witty, she didn’t fit the taker and whiner model. She grew up in a Republican family and described most of her life as very comfortable, although misfortune and homelessness have made her a liberal Democrat. One who took an interest was Sen. Jason Rapert, the conservative firebrand whose attacks on Obamacare and the Muslim-loving president made national news. Rapert had not voted for the Medicaid implementation but he promised to vote for the critical appropriation bill and also to round up the last votes needed from hard-line Republicans. “He is not the monster they make him out to be,” Graham said. “I truly think God put Jason Rapert there to get this done.”
crat with TV ads blaming him for President Obama’s supposedly runaway spending. But more about that to come. Do I think Pryor’s vote against background checks was cowardly? I did then. However, Democrats like The Daily Beast’s Mike Tomasky, who cite polls showing strong majorities of Arkansans favoring universal background checks, may be overlooking the difference between a mild preference expressed to a telephone pollster and a conviction strong enough to hold against a barrage of paranoid NRA propaganda. Can a majority of Arkansans be convinced that bogeyman Obama is coming to confiscate their guns? I wouldn’t bet against it in Arkansas or any state it borders upon — Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee or even Missouri. Simply put, fear and loathing of President Obama has reached cult-like proportions across the region, and there’s little Mark Pryor can do about it before November 2014. Almost everywhere you go — dentists’ offices, auto dealers, fitness centers, airports — the waiting room TV is tuned to Fox News, and people are swallowing it whole. So more than a year early, Sen. Pryor has come out swinging against his dream opponent: Michael Bloomberg. Even though no Republican rival has yet declared, he’s begun airing a 30-second TV spot complaining that, “The mayor of New York City is running ads against me because I opposed President Obama’s gun control legislation.”
The commercial ends with the senator striking a belligerent pose: “No one from New York or Washington tells me what to do,” he growls. “I listen to Arkansas.” Take that, limousine liberals! As much as the vote, it was the impression of weakness that may have been Pryor’s greatest liability. Months of unanswered Club for Growth ads also didn’t help. Now the question is whether he can carry the fight to his presumptive, albeit undeclared, GOP opponent Rep. Tom Cotton, the favored candidate of the aforementioned Club for Greed. Also of GOP kingmaker Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, whose greatest hits as a political prognosticator include the Iraq War and Sarah Palin. The hand-picked selection, that is, of another passel of New York/Washington elitists. A superficially appealing candidate with impressive credentials, Cotton also appears to be a stone right-wing zealot who not only voted against federal disaster aid for storm victims, but recently proposed a law punishing relatives of lawbreakers — parents, siblings, aunts and uncles — for their transgressions. In a word, a crackpot. Basically, Pryor’s got to portray himself as an advocate of the Arkansas Way — a moderate Democrat like his father, former Sen. David Pryor, like Dale Bumpers, and Bill Clinton — a just-folks pragmatist beset by condescending outsiders, and one who’ll fight for you as hard as he fights for himself. A longshot? Definitely. But it’s been done before. www.arktimes.com
JUNE 6, 2013
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