Arkansas seeks to find its place in the nonstop campaign

CapitolBy Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Tuesday that legislators will be returning to Little Rock for a special session May 26. The main reason will be to pass a bond issue to help Lockheed Martin compete for a contract to produce the military’s new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, the replacement for the Humvee, in Camden.

Lockheed Martin is a global megacorporation with $45.6 billion in sales in 2014, so it will be interesting to see what Arkansas taxpayers will be asked to fund. But this is the way the game is played these days, so Arkansas must play it. At stake is the production of 55,000 vehicles – basically, the auto plant the state long has coveted – and that’s not counting what foreign militaries might order. About 600 jobs would be created in south Arkansas, which needs them.

Legislators also will consider ways of streamlining state government – Hutchinson hasn’t offered concrete proposals regarding how – and might consider moving Arkansas’ political primaries, or maybe just the presidential ones, to March 1. That’s the subject of the rest of this column.

Tired of ceding the early presidential nominating process to Iowa and New Hampshire and then being forgotten later, a group of Southern states are considering holding their primaries March 1 in what many are calling the “SEC primary.”

Arkansas voters don’t usually play much of a role in presidential politics. The state’s primary election occurs so late in the process that many candidates have dropped out by the time Arkansans vote, and the state is so small that the remaining candidates don’t make it a priority. Legislators considered the SEC primary in the recently completed regular session. The bill didn’t pass, but support didn’t die. Maybe it would make Arkansas more relevant. It might give Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign a boost, which his supporters would see as a plus.

These campaigns start early – Jan. 3 in Iowa in 2012, in fact. This year, the Iowa caucus will be Feb. 1, nine months before the general election, and the New Hampshire primary will be Feb. 9. And of course, candidates already have been campaigning for months.

Didn’t we just have an election? These days, elected officials are so focused on the next campaign that they can’t do the jobs voters chose them to do in the previous one. And that’s a problem with real-life consequences.

Case in point: The federal Highway Trust Fund is nearly empty, and the bill that funds it expires at the end of this month. A real, multi-year replacement is badly needed, but time is running out. We were in this same situation last year, but of course an election was coming up, so Congress passed a gimmicky, short-term fix that funded 10 months of construction with revenues borrowed from the next decade. Now those 10 months are over, and we’re right back where we were. Uncertain about what Congress is going to do this time, the state Highway Department has cancelled $282 million in construction projects this year. Last month, the American Trucking Associations’ chief lobbyist told Arkansas trucking executives that a bill must be written this year or else we’ll have to wait until the end of 2017 because presidential politics will get in the way.
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Contrast American democracy with Great Britain’s recently completed parliamentary election. Queen Elizabeth formally dissolved Parliament in late March at the request of Prime Minister David Cameron, the election was scheduled for May 7, the parties campaigned, and 66.1 percent of the electorate voted. The Conservatives won, and Cameron retained his post. It was over in six weeks.

Great Britain has its own problems, of course, and nobody here wants a monarch, but the United States clearly is not well served by a democratic government where few have time to govern anymore. According to the Declaration of Independence, the “pursuit of happiness” is one of the three inalienable rights that led to America’s founding. Are the nonstop campaigning and barrage of toxic negative advertising helping you pursue happiness?

We’ll know whether the primary election will be moved before the session begins because only issues where the outcome is reasonably certain will be included in the call. It will be predetermined behind closed doors, which is not very transparent but is efficient.

At least they’ll govern, and then voters can decide if they did the right thing. I hear there’s an election coming up.

Huckabee the anti-Romney

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

I didn’t think that former Gov. Mike Huckabee was in the first tier of presidential hopefuls when he started talking about running. I probably had him at the bottom of the middle tier – somewhere around former Sen. Rick Santorum.

After covering Tuesday’s announcement, I’d move him into the first tier.

Huckabee’s appearance in his hometown of Hope drew a large crowd and lots of media. It was professional, with staff members and volunteers. He and wife Janet seemed confident and resolved. His campaign later announced his schedule for fundraising – always a weak spot of his.

Some people are saying he’s just looking for publicity. It didn’t look that way Tuesday. He already had a TV show, which he gave up in order to run.

No, this is a presidential campaign. The question is, can it be a winning one? His campaign points to poll numbers showing he has high favorability ratings among Republican voters compared to some of his potential opponents. Certainly, he knows how to speak to the party faithful.

His speech, which lasted half an hour, laid out a campaign theme of “From Hope to Higher Ground.” He mentioned gay marriage and abortion, of course, but he spent more time talking about economic policies, and that’s where he differentiates himself from many Republican candidates.

Average Americans’ wealth has stagnated at the same time that the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of us is becoming kind of scary. This is one of the defining issues of our time, but Republicans are terrible at talking about it, in part because too many of them, like Mitt Romney, identify with the 1 percent.

Republicans say they’re the party of smaller government, and they should continue to be that, but they must do a better job of explaining why. They must blame policies, not people, but they really must blame less, period, and offer a positive vision for the country. If they spend the next year-and-a-half being simply the anti-Obama, anti-Hillary party, they’ll win Arkansas but won’t win the presidency. It sounds touchy-feely, but they must show they care about the problems, hopes and dreams of average Americans.

You can’t fake that, and that’s why Huckabee’s candidacy can’t be dismissed. In some ways, he’s the anti-Romney. He’s making a lot of money now, but he spent most of his life in the middle class, and that’s where his sensibilities remain. Tuesday, the former Pine Bluff and Texarkana pastor painted himself as the candidate of the common man in a way that Romney, the venture capitalist, could not pretend to do.

The term for his brand of blue collar, anti-elite politics is “economic populism,” and it speaks to a segment of the population that votes in Republican Party primaries but doesn’t necessarily donate much money to campaigns. It’s a bit out of step with the direction the party’s been going, and a lot of big donors don’t like it. Huckabee criticizes government in general, but some conservatives don’t trust how he would govern specifically, given that as governor he helped create a statewide government health program, ARKids First, and raised some taxes (while cutting others). The powerful Club for Growth thinks he’s too liberal and has already bought $100,000 in anti-Huckabee ads running in Iowa and South Carolina. He’s called it the “club for greed.”

But all the candidates face headwinds. The party tends to select the safest, best-funded choice. That’s Jeb Bush this year, but even his own mother has questioned if Americans should elect a third member of the same family. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s candidacy has lost its shine. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul probably bucks Republican Party orthodoxy too often to be nominated.

Unlike the Democrats, Republicans don’t have a favorite at this point. So if Huckabee wins Iowa, he can start doing some damage.

This is not an endorsement of Huckabee’s candidacy or a prediction he’ll win. I still believe he’ll run out of gas at some point. The Republican establishment will want to coalesce behind someone early so it can target Hillary Clinton. In the end, the winner will be the candidate favored by the big money donors. It usually is.

Whoever that is, it has to be someone who can speak about the middle class and to the middle class. He or she must connect, not just campaign. Huckabee can do that, and that’s why he’s in the first tier.

Ex-con points way to closing prison’s revolving door

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Before this past legislative session, legislators were asked to consider building a $100 million prison, but nobody really wanted to do that. The state already housed more than 18,000 inmates, including a backlog of 2,500 in county jails, and a new prison would add only 1,000 beds. Forty-three percent of inmates released from prison return within three years, anyway. As soon as the new prison was finished, another would have to be built.

Other solutions are needed that change behavior, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said, so that prison becomes less of a revolving door. So he proposed, and legislators passed, a legislative package meant to provide a short-term fix, including renting space in Texas, and a more long-term effort that includes creating transitional re-entry centers where prisoners reintegrate into society – rather than just receiving the traditional $100 and a bus ticket back to the life that sent them to prison in the first place.

Hutchinson and legislators also created a criminal justice reform task force that is studying other options. Let’s hope its members talk to Jason Duncan.

Duncan, 33, does not look like an ex-con. He’s 6-5, handsome, and stands with a leader’s confident posture.

At age 18, he was a different person. At that point, he told me he decided “to seek whatever was pleasurable in the moment” and began a life that, a decade later, “found me completely addicted to drugs, a raging alcoholic and starting to develop quite a spectacular rap sheet.”

He was sitting in a concrete jail cell in North Carolina, a fugitive from Arkansas justice, when he opened a Bible out of boredom to Deuteronomy 28, read about curses resulting from disobedience, and saw himself. He decided to become a Christian, got out of jail, and immediately returned to his old life, which led him, finally, to an Arkansas correctional facility.

Duncan’s life began to change when he enrolled in a program offered through Arkansas Community Corrections where inmates are transported to Little Rock’s Arkansas Baptist College to participate in a program managed by Under Grace Ministries. The inmates attend classes in recovery, spiritual discipleship, entrepreneurial thinking and resource management.

The inmates stood out a little. They wore brown uniforms, which was OK because, Duncan said, “most of the students thought we worked for UPS.” Many were white, including Duncan, and they were attending class on a campus serving mostly African-American students that originally was built to educate former slaves.

The program gave Duncan the direction he needed. After leaving state custody, he remained at ABC for two semesters and then transferred to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he’s studying international business and marketing. He’s now the director of international student ministry at Fellowship Bible Church. He’s married and has a son from his previous life.

Last week, he spoke at a ceremony dedicating ABC’s Scott Ford Center for Entrepreneurship & Community Development, which will house an expanded version of the program that changed his life. So far, about 30 inmates have started the program. Next year, 100-120 will be involved.

I asked Duncan what services inmates need to return to society and stay out of prison. He said they need a spiritual foundation along with education and work training because many have never had a job and don’t really know what one is. They need help overcoming their addictions. Also, each one of them should transition to society in a halfway house, a “safe environment with accountability but also a mix of freedom.”

The recently passed legislative package will pay for 500 parolees to be involved in such transitional re-entry centers. The state each year releases 10,000 inmates back into society.

Duncan didn’t say it, but fewer people need to go to prison in the first place. There are two reasons 43 percent of inmates return to prison within three years. One is that they were messed up to begin with, and prison didn’t fix them. The other is that they had merely made mistakes to begin with, and then prison really messed them up.

Let’s hope policymakers wisely consider solutions from every angle – keeping people out of prison who shouldn’t be there, helping parolees avoid returning, and keeping those who should be in prison locked up. Let’s hope the state finds more partners like Under Grace Ministries and ABC. Halfway houses are a good start, but let’s not settle for halfway solutions.

What do teachers think of Common Core?

Common Core cover cutoutBy Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

What do Arkansas teachers think about the Common Core? According to a recent survey, 61 percent would keep it rather than eliminate it, but 87 percent don’t like the testing.

Those were some of the findings of the University of Arkansas’ Office for Education Policy, which asked 2,795 teachers to participate in an online survey and received responses from 975 of them.

Many Arkansas teachers seem to find a lot of positives in the Common Core, which is a set of common standards in math and English language arts currently used by 43 states. Sixty-six percent said they were satisfied with the standards, and 92 percent said they were more rigorous than the previous ones. Large majorities agreed or strongly agreed that the Common Core will lead to improved student learning, help students think critically, and better prepare them for college and the workforce.

Lt. Governor Tim Griffin, who is leading a panel appointed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson to review the standards, found the results somewhat contradictory. Despite the above results, when asked to complete the sentence, “Overall, my students will be ___ after the introduction of the Common Core Standards,” only 46 percent said “better off,” while 28 percent said “the same” and 26 percent said “worse off.”

In other words, less than half of the teachers said the Common Core will make a positive difference overall in the same survey where large majorities were saying it makes a positive difference in the areas that matter – learning, critical thinking, and college and career preparation.

Griffin, a public school father who seems willing to listen to both sides of the Common Core debate, said the survey is “interesting” and “helpful” but “not dispositive” – which, he had to explain to me, is a legal term meaning it doesn’t settle anything.

Polls rarely do, which is why a democracy shouldn’t be based on them. This is not a criticism of the Office for Education Policy, which seems to have conducted a thorough survey. But, as is often the case, of course you get contradictory results when you ask complicated people about complicated issues with only a few simple answers from which to choose. Also, survey respondents often answer the questions they want to answer, not the ones that are asked. (Happens in real-life conversations, too.)

Which brings us to the 87 percent who said they didn’t like the testing associated with Common Core. Of all the elements of the Common Core, the testing is the most controversial. Arkansas is part of a consortium of nine states plus the District of Columbia involved in the PARCC assessment, which compares students across state lines. At one time, there were 24 states, but a majority have left. Legislators considered doing the same here but ultimately decided to renew Arkansas’ participation no more than one year at a time.

There are many questions about the test, including how the data will be used and whether the results will be known in time to do any good. With an 87 percent majority, it’s clear that teachers don’t like PARCC, but many probably also were expressing years of frustration with testing in general. It takes too much time, and they don’t like being judged for how another human performs on a test.

Teaching has undergone many changes in recent years. No Child Left Behind put the federal government in charge of holding schools accountable. The state has instituted a Teacher Excellence and Support System to evaluate teachers and help them improve. New instructional methods are de-emphasizing lecturing. More and more, teachers instead are expected to guide students through technology-driven, project-based learning.

Change is hard. Sixty-four percent of the survey’s respondents disagreed with the statement, “I like teaching more now than before the Common Core Standards were introduced.” Seventy-four percent said that teaching has become more stressful. But 63 percent agreed that the Common Core has made them better at their job.

So maybe many in that 61 percent who said the Common Core should be retained really think it’s better. And maybe some were really just saying they didn’t want to change to something else yet again. Maybe some were just saying, “Let us catch our breath!”

At the very least, this much is clear: A majority of teachers who answered this survey want to keep the Common Core, and a large majority don’t like the testing.

What should Arkansas do with this information? It’s not dispositive.

Seek first to understand, even in politics

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The fifth of Dr. Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” is “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Could that apply to politics, even today?

Covey taught that being understood is such a fundamental need that it is impossible to influence another person until that need has been met. He compared it to air: Remove it from a room, and nothing else would matter to the occupants.

Unfortunately, understanding is in short supply – in Washington, D.C., of course, but also outside the Beltway. Americans are divided ideologically, culturally and even geographically. We live in red and blue states and in safe Republican and Democratic congressional districts. Even our neighborhoods and churches are largely politically segregated. As a result, we’re far more likely to talk about people on the other side than with them. Now we’re entering another campaign season where billions of dollars will be spent to disunite us. Didn’t we just have an election?

Seeking first to understand, then to be understood is important politically for three reasons: because none of us knows everything (except radio talk show hosts and TV pundits, of course); because most of us have something to offer; and because the stakes are too high not to try.

The issues that we argue about usually involve competing worthwhile values that are difficult to balance – what government should do to help the needy, for example. Few Americans, including conservatives, want the government to do absolutely nothing to help those who truly need it, and most of us, including liberals, agree that too much government dependence is bad both for society and for dependent individuals.

What’s the exact dollar figure that perfectly balances those two competing values? No one can know. Thank goodness we don’t have to hit that sweet spot perfectly. Just getting reasonably close and governing responsibly is good enough.

In a country with 300 million people, you don’t reach that point by digging ideological trenches and shooting at each other across no man’s land. That kind of thinking just perpetuates an unsustainable status quo.

So how about seeking first to understand? What if we humbly acknowledged that, because we don’t know everything, the greater good is accomplished by combining our ideas with others’? It’s good that liberals warn of the dangers of capitalism degenerating into a survival of the fittest mentality, and it’s good that conservatives voice their concerns about government’s inefficiencies and its capacity to restrict freedom.

By valuing both points of views, and others across the political spectrum, we can get to Covey’s sixth habit: Synergize. That’s the idea that individuals can come together from different places and create something better than what either would have created on their own. It’s much better than compromise, where no one walks away particularly happy. Compromise is better than continued fighting, and in politics, it’s often the best possible result. But synergy happens, too. It’s how we got the Constitution. These days, a framework might be created that better addresses human needs without increasing dependency and adding to the $18 trillion national debt.

Covey also taught that each of us inhabits two circles: a circle of concern where we have no control, and a circle of influence where we do. Focus on your circle of influence, he said.

I can’t create synergy in Washington, but I can seek first to understand, then to be understood in my own life. I’ve decided to learn to avoid fruitless political debates, online or in person – the kind where two people are concerned only with scoring points and not considering the other’s ideas. Nothing productive happens when two people are emotionally invested in a political argument and motivated by pride and fear of losing face. I’ve wasted my time on several of these lately. In the end, all I accomplished was become frustrated and lose 45 minutes that could have been spent more productively.

Instead, I’ve determined to treat these discussions as opportunities for partnership rather than competition – to seek first to understand. I expect I’ll learn something actually listening to others. Maybe we’ll create a dialogue that enriches us both. Maybe I’ll influence the other person, and if I don’t, I certainly wouldn’t have done so by trying to debate them into submission.

And if I’m caught in a conversation with someone who’s not seeking to understand? Hopefully, I’ll be wise enough to get out of it, go somewhere else, and get some air.