OPINION
The spoils system turns thuggish
R
epublicans’ smashing victories in the last two election cycles in Arkansas have had the usual results. More than governors Mike Beebe, a Democrat, and Mike Huckabee, a Republican, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson has moved to stock state government with political supporters and soulmates. A losing Republican candidate or former party functionary needs work? Hutchinson has installed them high and low, no previous experience necessary. No big deal. Government runs most days on autopilot through its permanent staff. A new agency director can do as much or as little as she chooses, delegating operational duties to deputies and maybe just occasionally dipping into business to change the stationery or order new furniture or change a building’s architectural features. But there’s a discipline and even a
brutality to the Republican control that beats previous administrations (and Mike Huckabee was not MAX exactly known for BRANTLEY a generous spirit.) maxbrantley@arktimes.com You see it particularly at the legislature. Just last week, Republican state Rep. Bob Ballinger moved to kill a $153,897 contract between the state Department of Workforce Service and the Arkansas AFL-CIO. The contract has existed for 38 years. It helps dislocated workers return to work. The contract was shortened to end in January. Then the state will decide whether the agency will do the work itself or hire an outside provider. I wouldn’t expect the eventual alternative to include the AFL-CIO. This puni-
Election won’t stop Hillary probes
H
illary Clinton gave such a bravura performance at the first Democratic presidential debate that many are ready to hand her the presidency more than a year before the election. Let it be said that she was smart (only a couple of forced factual errors), cheerful, personable, tough and even repentant — all qualities that a few or all of her critics from the right and the left said she did not have. Everyone knew she was a deft debater. Let it be said, too, that the debate helped both her and her party because both its tone and its message contrasted sharply with the Republican debates. The five mixed it up on issues but did not cast nasty slurs at each other or excite fears that the United States was at the mercy of ne’er-do-wells at home and foes around the planet and headed pell-mell to ruin. Listening to a Republican debate would scare the daylights out of Pollyanna.
But it remains to be seen whether hope and confidence play better than fear in a national election. ERNEST Franklin RoosDUMAS evelt and Ronald Reagan would say hope is the better card. A year into Reagan’s presidency, after he had passed mammoth tax cuts, the nation fell into the longest and deepest recession since the 1930s, running unemployment into double digits for 10 months and doubling its debt, and then in 1983 he sent 359 peacekeepers to Beirut to be killed or wounded by a truck bomb. But he told the country in 1984 that it was “morning in America” and voters happily obliged. The apostles of fear, on the other hand, have been winning elections lately. Still, whatever lift Clinton got from the debate, the dynamics of her politi-
tive action will be taken even though no one has complained about its work, not even during 12 years of Republican-led administrations. The difference now? Pure ideological vengeance. Ballinger was quoted in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “The AFLCIO has got a very negative reputation amongst a lot of people. They have used thuggery tactics in other places. Here in Arkansas, Alan [Hughes] has done a great job. But across the country they’ve got a very bad negative reputation.” Ballinger cited no specifics of thuggery, which the dictionary says means to treat others violently or roughly. His aim is clear enough. It’s implementation of the Republican anti-labor policy in a right-to-work state where labor is already marginalized. Who’s a thug? We’d seen this ideological thuggishness at work already. Gov. Hutchinson ordered an end to Medicaid funding of Planned Parenthood, a trifling sum of $50,000 or so that provides essential medical services to poor women and a few men. Why? Unverified allegations that a distantly related Planned Parenthood affiliate in another state that par-
ticipated in a legal program to provide fetal tissue for medical research. This offends Republican values sufficiently that innocent parties in Arkansas should suffer, beginning with telling women which doctors they can and cannot see. A federal court has ruled this illegal here, as it has in other states. The world is full of bad actors — thugs, if you will. By the Ballinger standard, we should disqualify Republicans from holding public jobs in Arkansas on account of Richard Nixon, Dennis Hastert, Mark Darr, Dennis Milligan or whichever Republican miscreant you care to name. I feel a little of the pain firsthand. Arkansas Republicans are moving systematically to strip state advertising from those with differing viewpoints. That’s politics to a degree. But the ruling party is, in theory, serving everyone in the state. Is it the Republican view that public money contributed by all taxpayers should be put to use only with and for those with whom the ruling party agrees? Recent actions by Ballinger and Hutchinson provide clues about the answer.
cal career have not changed. The road inauguration found a rude note for Hillto the presidency will be no smoother ary that Clinton-hater Rush Limbaugh than it ever was. That is owing to two somehow got sneaked under a pillow in conditions that shaped her public the Lincoln Bedroom. She figured the career and, almost to an equal extent, White House was “haunted by temporal her husband’s. Those are her brooding entities.” She would find furniture in obsession with privacy and the media’s the living quarters moved around and manic obsession with everything about discover that security agents, without the Clintons. Those will continue to consulting her, had been looking for dog her until Election Day, and far bugging devices. beyond if she is elected, just as they Her privacy fixation lay behind did her husband. many of the White House’s troubles Both in Little Rock and in Wash- — Travelgate, the big national health ington, Hillary insisted on a zone of insurance bust in 1994, and, most tellprivacy for the family and she largely ingly, the epic Whitewater snipe hunt got it on her terms in Little Rock but that led to the president’s impeachment not in D.C. Privacy is one of Americans’ for womanizing. It was her refusal to most prized freedoms, but they do not give up her law firm’s flimsy billing grant it to politicians and their fami- records on work for Jim McDougal’s lies or to other public figures. Hillary thrift that led to the appointment of an Clinton never understood, or at least independent counsel and eight years of never gave in. hounding. The trifling legal work she She was the pivotal decision-maker did for private concerns back in the in Bill Clinton’s 12 years as governor 1980s was nobody else’s business, and just as I believe she was in his eight even her husband could not budge her. years in the White House but, except When the records finally surfaced years in her role as the school reformer in later, as people back in Little Rock who chief in 1983, she avoided and resented had examined them knew, there was media. She went to lengths to keep the nothing there — invoices for niggling family’s vacation spots secret, only to title work and the like. But the political get a call from a reporter. It got worse damage was huge and lasting. in Washington. There was the inevitable email Her memoir, “Living History,” dustup at the State Department. For brooded about privacy. A friend stay- convenience, she opened and paid for a ing over at the White House at the first single email account that would include CONTINUED ON PAGE 29 www.arktimes.com
OCTOBER 22, 2015
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