Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- March 31, 1998
Mr. Clinton's zipper and news from home
VAN BUREN, Ark.It's an ill wind that blows nobody good, and Bill Clinton's celebrated troubles with his zipper may be good news for the Republicans in Arkansas. What happens here is crucial to Republican prospects in the South in November, which is in turn crucial to whether the party strengthens its control of Congress.
The native son has not been kind to the Democrats at home.
When the president left Arkansas in 1993 for Washington, the Democrats held nearly everything: the governorship, both seats in the U.S. Senate, all the state constitutional offices and nearly all the seats in both houses of the legislature. Five years later, the governor, the lieutenant governor, one U.S. senator and half the House delegation are Republicans, and it's possible --though still improbable -- that the GOP will sweep everything in November.
But what is not improbable is that Arkansas will, like the rest of the South before it, tip to the Republicans and probably for good, if not this year, then in the year 2000. Without the Clinton phenomenon, which many Arkansans regard as "the Clinton disgrace," the tip to the GOP might have been delayed for another decade.
The key to Republican success here lies in places like Van Buren (population 13,000) and surrounding Crawford County, in the newly prosperous northwest quadrant of the state, where trucking (J.B. Hunt, USA Express, ABF Systems), retailing (Wal-Mart) and food processing (Tyson's, Hudson Foods) have transformed the poorest part of a poor state into the most prosperous part of a state that is no longer as poor as it used to be.
Van Buren, in fact, was once the butt of bucolic humor, when a Crawford County boy named Bob Burns went to Hollywood in the '30s and became famous as a spinner of Arkansas tall tales. He played an improbable musical instrument called the bazooka, making a sound that roughly approximated a rude barnyard noise. Bob Burns, his tall tales and his musical instrument were so popular, in fact, that GIs in World War II named their famous anti-tank weapon "the bazooka."
The barefoot-hillbilly image stung an earlier generation of Arkansans, and with a certain twist of irony, the election of a native son as president of the United States has revived a certain bitterness over being the butt of national jokes. "We outlived the hillbilly image," says a young woman, a clerk in a store in the historic downtown, "and now everybody thinks all we do down here is drop our drawers and behave like Hottentots. I wish Jay Leno and David Letterman would cool it with the Clinton jokes, but the man to blame is Clinton himself."
But does that make Republicans look good?
"Well," she says, "we've always been Democrats. My grandfather would throttle me if he thought I'd vote Republican, but I don't understand that line of thinking."
This sounds familiar to Ruth Reed Whitaker, a physician's wife who is the chairman of the Crawford County Republican Committee. "We carried the county for Dole, and the courthouse is still in Democratic control. But this year we've got 12 candidates for county office, and we think we'll do real well." She drops her voice, as if someone might be listening, to confide: "We've got a couple of Democrats who are ready to switch parties."
Party-switching, in fact, is what terrorizes Bill Clinton's remaining Arkansas friends in the midnight hour. If Mike Huckabee is re-elected as governor, as expected; if the Republicans capture the Senate seat held by Dale Bumpers, as some Democrats glumly agree is no worse than an even bet; and if the Republicans win several other state offices, the surviving Democrats might finally examine the handwriting on the wall. Says one longtime Democratic officeholder: "It's got to occur to us sooner or later that a deathbed conversion is better than no conversion at all."
The Democrats have succeeded so far in persuading enough voters that "Republican" is synonymous with a loathsome disease, best not talked about in polite company. Old-timers still angrily remind everyone that two presidents sent an invading army into Arkansas, and both of them (Lincoln in 1861, Eisenhower in 1957) were Republicans. Republicans, to these old-timers, are rich, likely to be bankers and maybe newcomers from the North.
They're losing the argument because the new Republicans, like those here in Crawford County, are people just like Democrats: teachers, housewives, a few lawyers, clerks, small-business men -- updated versions of the Arkansans that a turn-of-the-century governor was fond of describing as "the horny-handed so of toil." They want no part of Bill Clinton's vision of what America ought to be, and it's that vision the fading Democrats of Arkansas are stuck with.Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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