Category Archives: Elections

Everyone’s an extra, even in Congress

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

I’m not the good guy. Neither are you. And neither are Mark Pryor nor Tom Cotton.

I bring that up because we’re in the middle of a campaign season where television ads, and many news providers, treat what should be a statewide job interview instead like a TV show.

And boy, there are a lot of those ads. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the candidates, the parties and independent groups had broadcast 40,576 of them in Arkansas during the 2014 campaign in the Senate race alone as of Sept. 22.

From the time we are born, Americans are fed a steady diet of fiction. Movies, books, TV shows – including sitcoms – often feature three elements: a protagonist who is the hero (along with sidekicks and love interests), an antagonist who is the villain, and extras.

Except in rare cases, whoever spends the most time on camera is the hero, even if the antagonist is more worthy of admiration. For example, in “Rocky,” Rocky Balboa may have had a heart of gold, but he had been a lifetime underachiever and a loan shark’s debt collector, while Apollo Creed was an undefeated champion, smart businessman, and devoted husband and father. We cheer for Rocky.

In our lives, we’re the protagonist, so we believe we’re the hero, which means there must be villains somewhere. Our flaws are merely the personal challenges all heroes must overcome, while the villains never change and have only evil intentions. That’s how a story works.

This is not a healthy thing for any of us. It leads to pride and narrow-mindedness and a lack of grace toward others. It’s particularly problematic in politics. There are many reasons why today’s Congress is dysfunctional, but could one be that its members, raised on television like the rest of us, have bought into the fiction?

For the past year-and-a-half, we’ve watched Cotton and Pryor try to destroy each other on television. Other races with less money at their disposal are behaving in a similar fashion, especially now that the election is nearing. The gloves have really come off in the 2nd Congressional District race between French Hill and Patrick Henry Hays.

I’ve been around enough of these campaigns to know that few of the candidates believe they are at fault. Both sides believe their opponent started it all by lying and slinging mud, so everything they do now is justifiable. In the battle between good and evil, the stakes are too high to worry about fair play.

The next time you’re tempted to put your faith in a politician, or even, for 700 words, a columnist, google “Voyager” and “Pale Blue Dot.” You’ll see a photo of Earth taken by Voyager I from four billion miles away. The planet is tiny. On that little blue dot are billions of smaller dots, all of us running around thinking we are the center of the universe – or at least, the hero of the story.

The truth is, we’re all extras. Every last one of us.

It’s not that either Cotton or Pryor are villains. In fact, they’re both good people – good extras. But when 535 extras journey to Congress, all believing they’re the hero and all looking for dragons to slay, well, then you get the train wreck that Washington has become.

There’s a reason the Constitution’s defining principle is a limitation of power. Our government is designed to prevent the rise of even the most benevolent of dictators for fear of where that could lead.

Under the Constitution, compromise and cooperation are required to accomplish even basic governance, despite the fact that it’s bad TV. For us to think constitutionally requires us to overcome a lifetime of fictional programming, where you don’t compromise or cooperate with the villain. You defeat him, and then you get the girl.

But that’s TV, not real life. I’m not sure if today’s candidates always know the difference. I’m not sure if we voters do, either.

Asa vs. Mike: Different, but not really

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The race for U.S. Senate features two candidates of completely different ideologies, approaches, backgrounds and temperaments. If you believe that Sen. Mark Pryor is right, then you almost have to believe that Rep. Tom Cotton is wrong.

The race for governor between former Rep. Asa Hutchinson and former Rep. Mike Ross? Not so much. State government, as opposed to D.C. politics, tends to force both parties to the center anyway, and that’s definitely the case this year.

Friday night’s testy televised governor’s debate sponsored by KARK illustrated the candidates’ differences that are not so different. As they have throughout this campaign, they disagreed, sometimes personally, on policies but not so much on goals. You know those online roadmap programs where you type in your starting point and your destination and are presented three routes that eventually converge? One of those routes is Hutchinson, and one is Ross.

For example, Hutchinson says he wants to be the “jobs governor,” while Ross says he wants to be the “education governor.” But both men know the state needs a good education system to create jobs, and both men know it needs jobs to pay for a good education system.

Both candidates want to cut income taxes by reforming the state’s tax code, which hasn’t been modernized since 1971 and therefore places Arkansans earning only $34,000 a year in the highest tax bracket of 7 percent. Hutchinson would reduce rates for Arkansans earning from $20,400 to $75,000. Ross would raise the top tax bracket’s minimum income to $75,100, meaning it would capture fewer Arkansans. Hutchinson would implement his plan next year; Ross would phase in his over time but says his would be bigger.

Different? Sure. But either candidate could have proposed either plan.

On some other issues, the candidates largely agree. They’re both not crazy about the state spending $100 million to build another prison and would like to consider alternative sentences. They both support keeping the Governor’s Quick Action Closing Fund, which gives the governor a pile of money to use to attract employers.

Even some areas of disagreement are largely differences of degree. For example, Ross’ signature education proposal would increase state pre-kindergarten funding for four-year-olds so that it eventually covers all families with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level. It currently covers families up to 200 percent but is not fully funded. Pre-K is not really Hutchinson’s thing, but he says he’d fully fund it up to 200 percent.

Those are real differences with consequences, but they don’t represent radically different visions of what the state should look like.

As for the state’s Medicaid private option, Ross is clearly a defender. Hutchinson has not said he’s against it, which means he’s mostly for it. If Ross is elected governor, he’ll probably fight Republicans in the Legislature to keep it largely as it is. If Hutchinson wins, he’ll probably work with Republican legislators to change it without trashing it. Neither would jeopardize his tax cut plan by refusing billions of federal dollars currently insuring 200,000 Arkansans.

Even their backgrounds are not that different. They both tout their modest, middle class upbringings. They both are establishment-type candidates who have spent a lot of time in Washington, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Hutchinson was elected to Congress in 1996 and then served as director of the Drug Enforcement Administration and then as under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Ross spent 12 years in Congress. Ross is a conservative Democrat and Hutchinson is a conservative Republican, but neither are bomb-throwers.

Of course these two men are different, and they would be different governors. But if you are a Hutchinson supporter, you could probably live with Mike Ross, and vice versa. Arkansas state government under either man would look about the same, while 100 Tom Cottons in the U.S. Senate would produce very different results than 100 Mark Pryors.

School elections: big issues, few voters

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

You wouldn’t know it from all the political ads still running, but some of the most important elections in Arkansas this year have already occurred.

Those would be Tuesday’s school elections.

In Jacksonville and north Pulaski County, 95 percent of voters elected to separate from the Pulaski County Special School District, a large doughnut-shaped district that surrounds Little Rock and North Little Rock. Voters wanted more of a say in a district whose administrative offices are on the other side of the county.

That’s a big deal. Ninety-five percent of voters don’t agree on anything unless they live in North Korea. It also represents a temporary break from a historical trend of school consolidation. According to a history written by Kellar Noggle, former executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators, Arkansas had 4,734 school districts in 1927. Before Tuesday, that number had shrunk to 238. Unless another consolidates before Jacksonville’s separation is complete, there will be 239.

While the Jacksonville election attracted almost 4,000 voters, turnout elsewhere was low, as always. Two competitive school board races that unseated incumbents in the 25,000-student Little Rock School District attracted a little over 1,300 voters. Before the election, Randy Zook, head of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, asked 400 Rotarians in Little Rock if they knew the date of the upcoming vote. Half a dozen raised their hands.

It’s a problem when a school board election in Little Rock is decided by a vote of 379-221. Those low numbers make it easier to manipulate an election and then manipulate policymaking. A candidate can be elected with the support of a few people with an agenda and then try to implement that agenda once in office.

The rest of this column will cover what, if anything, should be done about this low turnout. I should disclose that I publish a magazine, Report Card, in partnership with the Arkansas School Boards Association (ASBA). It is supported by advertising, and ASBA does not pay me, but I have done other work in which it has. I think I can play this straight.

It’s understandable that school board elections attract little attention. School board offices are unpaid, part-time, and nonpartisan. Most candidates don’t have the funds to advertise and attract voters’ attention – especially in a year like this when the U.S. Senate and governor’s races grab so many headlines.

If the problem is simply a lack of attention, could that be fixed? Last year, the advocacy group Arkansas Learns spent $100,000 on advertisements and automated phone calls encouraging people to vote – not for a particular candidate, just to vote – in various contested races. It made so little difference that it did not repeat the effort this year.

Arkansas Learns’ president and CEO, Gary Newton, instead favors holding school board elections in November with the other races. Doing so would result in more voters expressing their will and would reduce the potential for manipulation that can result from low turnout. The idea has been proposed in previous legislative sessions and been voted down, but it might pass in 2015. Arkansas has moved the date of school elections before. A few decades ago, they were in March.

ASBA is opposed. It says school elections should be a separate vote and that November elections would politicize a traditionally nonpartisan office. Don’t make the local banker and the local farmer running for school board compete for attention with Mark Pryor and Tom Cotton, it says. A lot of voters will just end up guessing.

I come down on ASBA’s side on this. My November ballot is already too crowded with races for U.S. Senate, U.S. Congress, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, auditor, land commissioner, county judge, sheriff, and who knows what else. I don’t even know who some of these people are or what the offices really do.

On the other hand, I publish a quarterly magazine for school board members, and this election nearly snuck up on me as a journalist. Who thinks about voting in September?

There is one other alternative: Get rid of school boards. However, so much power in education has already moved to the state and federal levels. Unless mayors are put in charge, without school boards, there would be no local control at all.

You might argue it doesn’t really matter where school policy is made. It certainly mattered to the folks in Jacksonville.

GOP Senate takeover is best for all

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

This is not an endorsement of Rep. Tom Cotton, but it’s best for everyone – in some ways, even President Obama – if Republicans take over the Senate. They are almost certain to maintain control of the House, so a GOP-controlled Senate is the only way our government might be able to function during the next two years.

We’ve seen what happens when one party controls the House and the other controls the Senate in the current political climate – a complete train wreck. Nobody has to take responsibility because everybody can just blame the other side. As a result, Americans have witnessed a series of avoidable fiscal crises and a government shutdown. It’s also why we’ve seen hundreds of show votes that have little purpose but to score political points, such as the Republican House’s dozens of votes to repeal or cripple Obamacare. Those bills died in the Senate, which the House members knew would happen all along.

Just as a split Congress is bad for the country, so too is one-party control. Under the Constitution, the White House and Congress are supposed to check and balance each other. But the way the system has evolved, when the president and the congressional majority are of the same party, they see themselves as members of the same team.

In contrast, the government functioned reasonably well at times from 1994-2000, when Democrats controlled the White House under President Clinton and Republicans controlled Congress. The melting pot of ideas and priorities brought both branches of government to the center. Together they reformed welfare and passed polices that enabled the government to balance the budget, sort of. On the other hand, Monica Lewinsky happened.

If Republicans win control of the Senate (and keep the House), they will have a responsibility to govern, not just oppose Obama. They will need to show the country they can accomplish something constructive so they can win again in 2016.

So there will not be dozens of votes to repeal Obamacare because if Republicans actually did that, they’d have the responsibility to replace it with something else, and they don’t know what that would be.

Instead, GOP members will pass one bill to repeal Obamacare in the House and try to pass one in the Senate to satisfy their base voters. If it somehow survived a Democratic filibuster attempt in the Senate, Obama of course would use his veto. If that were to happen, everyone on both sides would rant and rave, and then hopefully Congress would get down to business and start amending the law – for example, by passing tort reform to limit the excesses of medical malpractice lawsuits. Obama might even sign such a bill because a Republican takeover of the Senate would force (and on some issues allow) him and some congressional Democrats to move to the center.

Mike Ross, who spent 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, has made a similar argument in his race for governor. Republicans already are assured of a minimum of 20 of the 35 seats in the Arkansas Senate. They’ll almost certainly control the House as well.

Ross has said his election will keep one party from controlling everything. That’s true, although the Arkansas governor’s veto is far less powerful than the president’s. While a presidential veto requires a two-thirds vote to override, the state Legislature merely needs a simple majority, which is the same percentage that passed the bill in the first place. Still, the governor is the state’s chief executive – the one able to get everybody’s attention, and the one who remains in Little Rock administering state government after legislators have gone home.

So Ross is right. Voting for him will result in divided government in Little Rock, and voting for his opponent, Asa Hutchinson, will result in one-party control.

That’s not an endorsement of Ross any more than this column is endorsing Cotton. There are many other reasons to choose one candidate over the other. Besides, Little Rock is not Washington – not now, and hopefully not ever.

The minimum wage: Make it about work, not fairness

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansans in November will vote on whether or not to raise the minimum wage incrementally from its current $6.25 an hour to $8.50 by the beginning of 2017. There is no organized opposition, the State Commerce of Commerce doesn’t have an opinion, and polls have shown it is likely to pass.

For perspective on this Arkansas-based issue, let’s check with a self-described “zillionaire” from Seattle.

Nick Hanauer earned his billions starting and helping start more than 30 companies and was an early investor in Amazon.com. He’s written a widely shared piece for Politico magazine, “The Pitchforks Are Coming … For Us Plutocrats.” A plutocrat is a powerful, wealthy person.

Hanauer says the shrinking middle class is bad for everyone. The top 1 percent earn about 20 percent of the nation’s income while the bottom half earn just 12 percent – a gap that is widening. He points out that capitalist societies don’t survive long without a healthy middle class – the economy’s real job creator. As the middle class shrinks, consumers have less money to spend at businesses owned by rich people. Eventually, he writes, the common people get restless, and then you have problems – historically, either a revolution or a police state. As Hanauer jokingly told radio host Tavis Smiley, the super-rich have the most to gain or lose “because we’re the ones that go to the guillotine.”

Hanauer’s only specific prescription in his piece is raising the minimum wage. In Seattle, the economy has boomed even as the minimum wage has increased to $15 an hour – which would be too high for Arkansas.

Arkansas is one of only four states whose minimum wage falls below the federal level of $7.25 per hour. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012 there were 50,000 employees here above the age of 16 earning at or below the federal minimum wage. That’s about 6.9 percent of all workers here who, if they work 40 hours a week and never take a vacation, earn $13,000 a year before taxes.

You might say that’s not fair. If you do, Hanauer would say you’re using the wrong language. He says supporters of raising the minimum wage should stop talking about fairness and instead focus on the economic benefits that occur when work pays. People who earn a livable wage have money to spend at local businesses and don’t require government assistance, as do many fast-food and other low-wage workers now. “The fundamental law of capitalism is, when workers have more money, businesses have more customers,” Hanauer told Smiley.

The same argument is being made – and should be made more aggressively – by supporters of the private option. That’s the state program that uses Medicaid dollars to buy private insurance for low-income Arkansans. It had enrolled 163,480 people as of July 31.

One of the arguments opponents make is that it’s an expansion of government, and they are right, in one way. But remember that the private option is a benefit for “low-income Arkansans,” not “no-income Arkansans.” Recipients are engaged in some form of employment that had made them ineligible for free government health care through Medicaid. They’ve made choices to try to be self-sufficient. If the private option is repealed, the practical result will be that they will get free health care anyway because they won’t be able to afford it on their own. Moreover, the message sent to recipients will be that they are better off not working and instead should depend on the government like some of the people they know.

The wealth gap must be addressed. Without a strong middle class, both democracy and capitalism are corrupted. There’s a reason why the Wall Streeters who nearly wrecked the economy were bailed out: They make the rules. And without a strong middle class, the economy enters a death spiral where not enough people spend not enough money to support not enough businesses, which then hire not enough people.

But how we talk about the wealth gap is as important as what is done about it. Please, no more political movements encouraging us to see ourselves as victims. Hanauer is right: As society debates issues like raising the minimum wage, the focus should be on self-sufficiency, not fairness. There are many things about which Americans can’t agree, including what’s “fair,” but most of us believe this: It’s better for people to earn a real paycheck than to accept a government handout.

Here’s Hanauer’s Politico article.

Here’s Hanauer’s interview with Tavis Smiley.