There was a noteworthy moment in Arkansas political history Tuesday at the Capitol.
Twenty-six Democratic legislators stood at a podium in the Old Supreme Courtroom and held a press conference to talk about their party’s agenda for the upcoming fiscal session.
The agenda was entirely mom-and-apple-pie stuff — pledging to balance the budget without raising taxes, to legislate in a bipartisan manner, and to do only what the people of Arkansas instructed them to do when they voted to start having the sessions, which is to create a budget and then go home.
What was remarkable was that the Democratic legislators felt compelled to talk about themselves as a party at all.
This is Arkansas, at one time probably the most one-party state in the Union. When Winthrop Rockefeller was elected governor in 1966, he was greeted by a Legislature with a grand total of three fellow Republicans out of 135 members. Even after the 2008 elections, when Arkansans were voting 59-39 for John McCain over Barack Obama, Democrats still controlled 98 of the Legislature’s 135 seats.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
In fact, so dominant were the Democrats for so many years that some said Arkansas wasn’t so much a one-party state as it was a no-party state. Divisions were based on other factors, such as personality or urban vs. rural. There may not have been much of a Republican Party, but there were plenty of Republicans. They just were called Democrats back then.
The past three years have changed that in the state Legislature. In 2010, Arkansans who didn’t like Obama or his health care reform began a process of flipping the state Capitol. Now there are 74 Democrats and 61 Republicans. Arkansas now has two parties — one ascendant, the other a little shell-shocked but trying to find its footing.
Obama again will be on the ballot this year, which is part of the reason those Democratic legislators were standing up there talking about their majority. They hope not to become the minority.
What does it mean for the rest of us?
The good news is, we’ll have a more vigorous debate. In the past, a lot of bills affecting a lot of people and spending a lot of money have passed far too easily — often unanimously or almost so — because the political culture encouraged members to make nice. There is nothing wrong with legislators from either party creating and communicating an agenda, so long as they try to enact that agenda in a statesmanlike fashion.
The danger of this new two-party system, of course, is that Little Rock will start to look like Washington, where political posturing has completely eclipsed principled policymaking.
We should heed the words of George Washington, who knew a little about what it means to be an American. In his 6,100-word Farewell Address, he spent 930 words warning about “the spirit of party.” “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” he wrote in one paragraph. “It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”
Any of that sound familiar?
He concluded by describing that partisan spirit this way: “A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”
Washington, D.C. is consumed. Little Rock is not yet.
But it quickly could get hotter.
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Steve Brawner is an independent journalist in Arkansas. His e-mail address is brawnersteve@mac.com.