Category Archives: Politics

What led Rhoda to make his ‘Hillary comment’?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications

If you care way too much about Arkansas politics, then you may know that a Republican official said something he shouldn’t have said the other day.

The party’s 2nd Congressional District chairman, Johnny Rhoda, was quoted by U.S. News & World Report saying that if Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, “She’d probably get shot at the state line.” He went on to say, “Nobody has any affection for her. The majority don’t.”

The timing was especially bad, considering Clinton was scheduled to visit Little Rock Friday. A minor political firestorm erupted, and Rhoda resigned.

Rhoda is not an elected official, but he’s long been involved in Republican Party politics. The obvious question is, knowing what he knows, how could he have made such a comment to a national reporter?

And I suspect the answer is this: If he’s like a lot of us, he probably has said something like that before, or at least heard it in private.

Maybe not. It’s possible that Rhoda just made an unfortunate offhand comment out of the blue. Certainly, he did not mean to threaten or wish harm upon Clinton.

Let’s still use this episode to launch into a discussion of the bigger issue, which is that it’s becoming common for this kind of thing to be said in everyday and public conversation – more common than it used to be, it seems, but maybe I’m just imagining that. As memory serves, President Reagan used to fire off some real zingers at Democrats, but he described them as merely wrong, not evil. He reserved the truly tough rhetoric for the actual enemies who had missiles pointed at us and guns pointed at their own citizens.

Here’s how we live these days: in houses very similar to the ones around ours; in communities where most believe much the same way; in churches where most members are of the same background; in congressional districts drawn to ensure the like-minded vote together; in states that, with few exceptions, are either red or blue. We safely can consume only news media sources that assure us we must be correct because the other side is so very ill-intentioned. Even the ads on the websites we frequent are microtargeted to our likely political beliefs.

We have self-segregated in just about every way possible. Of course we believe “nobody has any affection” for politicians we don’t like. Nobody we discuss politics with ever does.

The result is that it becomes easy to turn human beings like Hillary Clinton into one-dimensional movie characters – heroes or villains.

Human beings are not movie characters. If Clinton were to visit most Republicans’ living rooms, I suspect everyone would soon find they had a lot more in common than they might have expected. She’s a lifelong Methodist, a daughter, a wife, a mother, and an expectant grandmother. Given her experiences, she’s probably an interesting conversationalist. The same would be true if President George W. Bush visited a family of Democrats, even though 35 percent of them once told a pollster that he had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.

I don’t know that publicly making light of shooting people makes it more likely that anyone actually will get shot. Political assassination attempts in America are rare and often motivated by insanity more than belief.

But while we’re not killing people, we are dehumanizing them, and that’s bad for many reasons. On a national political level, it makes it more difficult for our representative democracy to function. On a personal level, it makes us less happy people. If we spend three hours listening to a radio talk show host tell us how much he dislikes certain people, pretty soon we’ll dislike them, too. And then we’ll say as much, even to a member of the national media.

So the bigger issue is not what one party official said to a journalist. The bigger issue is that we’re not relating to each other as well as we might, and the way our society is structured, it’s becoming easier not to try.

On the bright side, we’re not shooting each other at the state line. We didn’t relate too well with each other in the mid-1800s or during the civil rights struggle, either.

But a little more affection for each other would make this a more perfect union. Or at least, a less imperfect one.

Does Arkansas really need runoffs?

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications

Leslie Rutledge and David Sterling, the state’s two remaining Republican candidates for attorney general, spent the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s runoff election scouring the state looking for votes. The question is, should they have had to?

They were “scouring” rather than “campaigning” because of the expected low turnout. (It was 5.4 percent.) All the other statewide races had already been decided in the party primaries, which themselves drew turnout of only 21.32 percent. A few local races – sheriff in Saline County, state Senate in the Harrison area – drew attention and voters.

That means those areas had an outsized influence in determining the Republican candidate for attorney general, along with three other groups: Republican diehards, people who believe it is their duty to vote in every election, and maybe a few Democrats who thought they might could manipulate the system by trying to vote for the worse candidate.

“The people” did not vote in this runoff. Only a few of the people did. And that’s a problem. Runoffs are supposed to select a nominee who has the broadest support, once the candidates who finished third or worse are eliminated. Instead, because of low turnout, the opposite is often the case. The candidate who can appeal to a motivated minority often wins. The more conservative candidate in the Republican Party and the more liberal candidate in the Democratic Party usually has the advantage even if they aren’t the best candidate. It also gives extra influence to outside groups like the one promoting Sterling for his support of a “stand your ground” law.

The practical reason for runoffs is to prevent an unacceptable candidate from sneaking into office because he or she manages a fluke win in a crowded field. In a multi-candidate race, it’s possible for a candidate to finish first thanks to the votes of a minority of voters but still be unacceptable to the majority. Arkansas, in fact, implemented runoffs in the 1930s to keep Ku Klux Klan members from getting elected that way.

Solutions? One is to have no runoffs at all. Only six other states require them when no candidate wins a majority – Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and South Carolina. In 43 states, Rutledge would have been the nominee because she won 47.21 percent of the vote in the primary May 20. Sterling won 39.11 percent.

Another solution is to lower the bar. Instead of requiring candidates to win 50 percent of the vote, make it 40 percent, as is the case in North Carolina. That would require a candidate to demonstrate broad support. In that case, Rutledge still would have been the nominee.

A third solution is instant runoff voting, where voters rank candidates in order of preference instead of just voting for one. A process of mathematical elimination chooses a winner who finished the highest on the most ballots.

There is one other solution. Primary voters could again make the trek to the polls in the runoff – even if it is for a position like attorney general that, though important, doesn’t excite much interest.

Elections should be democratic, fair and practical. Without a runoff, the primary, where a large number of people voted, would have selected an acceptable candidate in Rutledge. Sterling is also acceptable, but if he had won on Tuesday, then the candidate who won 39 percent of the vote in the primary would have beaten the candidate who won 47 percent.

Because of the runoff, the candidates had to raise money and find voters, taxpayers had to pay for a statewide election, volunteers had to man voting booths for a week – all to select a nominee based on 5.4 percent of the vote. This can’t be the best way.

Who got us into this debt?

By Steve Brawner

Who was the last Republican president to preside over a budget surplus throughout an entire fiscal year? When was the last time a Democratic Congress created a surplus? And when did a party create a surplus while controlling both the White House and the Congress?

It’s been a while in all three cases.

Let’s start by explaining the terms. The federal government’s fiscal year starts Oct. 1 and ends the next Sept. 30. A budget surplus occurs when the government collects more than it spends during a single fiscal year’s time. Most years our government runs deficits, which over time have created a $17.5 trillion national debt – an amount equal to more than $50,000 for every American. If the government were to run a $100 billion surplus this year (which it won’t), the national debt then would be $17.4 trillion.

The last time the federal government ran a surplus was 2001, when it collected $128 billion more than it spent, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

That was President George W. Bush’s first year in office, so he’s the last Republican president to preside over a surplus, right? Well, not really. The fiscal year began Oct. 1, 2000, nearly four months before Bush was president. His predecessor, Bill Clinton, signed almost all the bills that funded the government for 2001. Bush can’t get much credit for something that happened under Clinton.

The federal government also ran surpluses from 1998 to 2000 under Clinton’s watch. During that time, Republicans were in charge of both the House and Senate, so those surpluses occurred under a Democratic president and Republican Congresses.

Before that, the federal government had run budget deficits every year since 1969. That means that, each year, the overall debt grew larger. Working backwards, those deficits occurred annually under Republicans George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, Democrat Jimmy Carter, and Republicans Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.

Fiscal year 1969, a surplus year, ended during Nixon’s first year in office, but at that time the fiscal year started July 1, 1968, so Democrat Lyndon Johnson was president for more than half of it. Democrats controlled Congress the entire fiscal year.

That was the last time a Congress controlled by Democrats created a surplus. It was the year the United States first landed on the moon, and it was 45 years ago.

The previous surplus occurred nine years earlier in 1960 under Dwight Eisenhower, who also presided over surpluses in 1956 and 1957, working each year with Democratic-controlled Congresses.

Eisenhower therefore was the last Republican president to preside over a surplus during an entire fiscal year – 54 years ago. I like Ike.

When was the last time a surplus occurred when a single party controlled both the White House and Congress? The surplus year of 1969 started under Johnson and occurred under a Democratic Congress. You could say it was that year.

However, the last time a party ran a surplus throughout an entire fiscal year while controlling Congress and the White House was 1951, when President Harry Truman and a Democratic Congress were in power. The last time Republicans balanced a budget while running everything was 1930 under President Herbert Hoover.

This is, admittedly, a simplistic analysis. The sample size is small. Since 1930, there have been only seven Republican presidents and only seven Democrats, and it’s relatively rare for a party to control the White House and both houses of Congress. Also, the fact that fiscal years don’t align with election years complicates things. Finally, budget surpluses and deficits are dependent on many factors a president and Congress can’t really control, including the actions of their predecessors.

Still, it should be clear that both parties share the blame for this $17.5 trillion debt we’re passing on to our children. Just getting rid of that Democrat in the White House or firing only those Republicans in Congress will not solve this particular problem.

Both Republicans and Democrats led us into this hole. So who’s going to lead us out?

Arkansas Week, June 6

I appeared on AETN’s “Arkansas Week” Friday with host Steve Barnes, longtime journalist Ernie Dumas, and KUAR’s Ernie Dumas. We discussed the upcoming runoff elections, the Pryor-Cotton Senate race, state revenues and the possible upcoming special session about school employee insurance.

Should states decide on immigration?

By Steve Brawner

Should immigration be more of a state issue than it is now? Ken Hamilton, Libertarian candidate for Congress in the 4th District, says it should be. The federal government sure can’t seem to solve it on its own.

Here’s how immigration would work if Hamilton, 58, an El Dorado accountant with Murphy USA, got his way. The federal government would continue to enforce border security and decide who gets to come into the country, but it would do so based on requests from the states. Some states would want a lot of immigrants, others not so many.

So say California decides it needs 10,000 farm workers. The federal government would grant that many visas to work in California only.

Then California would take it from there. Immigrants could work wherever they want within that state’s borders – unlike today’s employer-based visas, which force them to serve a particular boss who is regulated by the federal government. Immigrants could travel to other states, but they couldn’t work in them legally. However, certain immigrants such as migrant farm workers could receive visas allowing them to travel between states based on growing seasons. California could offer permanent state residency to those immigrant workers who follow the rules. It also could allot visas to members of its current illegal immigrant population. Eventually, immigrants could earn U.S. citizenship. In the meantime, states could determine what benefits they receive.

“The states can tailor the program to what they need,” he said. “If they need high-tech, they can do it. If they need farm workers, they can do it. I think that’s the best way to do it rather than a top-down, one-size-fits-all program out of the federal government.”

Hamilton says a state-based approach would break the logjam in Congress. Democrats typically favor a path to citizenship. Republicans, meanwhile, are split between two factions. Establishment Republicans want a more open policy because employers need the workers and because the party needs to better appeal to Hispanics, a fast-growing minority that is siding with Democrats in elections. On the other side, a large faction of Republicans say a path to citizenship amounts to awarding amnesty to lawbreakers. Secure the border, they say.

The result has been a sometimes ugly debate that hasn’t solved anything. We all know the current system inadequately controls the border. We all know it’s resulted in millions of illegal immigrants living here as part of a shadowy underclass without a real stake in society or an opportunity to achieve the American dream. We all know this situation provides a lot of cheap labor but also hurts certain American workers. But, election to election, little changes.

Hamilton, of course, almost certainly won’t be elected. The United States remains staunchly a two-party system despite voters’ unhappiness with what’s happening in Washington.

But picking winners and losers is not the only reason we have elections. It’s also a chance to have a national debate about the issues. The two major parties, whether they are promoting a path to citizenship or favor just closing the border, haven’t gotten us anywhere.

They can’t even figure out what to do with illegal immigrants who were brought here as children by their parents and have much-needed technical skills. American taxpayers pay for an undocumented child immigrant to go to public school, sometimes from kindergarten through the 12th grade, but then it’s difficult for them to go to college and nearly impossible for them to fulfill their potential in the workforce. We won’t even give them a chance to earn their citizenship by serving in the military.

So now someone else is offering another option: If Washington can’t solve the problem, let the states take charge.

Got a better idea?