So far, it appears the Beebe administration was worth waiting for.

Governor only a year and a half,
Mike Beebe has reached goals that eluded his predecessors, spoken out
on controversial issues when he could easily have remained silent, and
maintained an amazingly high level of popularity through it all, even
with people who didn’t really expect to like him much. Somebody
suggested he could be Governor for Life if the state constitution
didn’t impose a two-term limit.

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These happy days were a long time getting
here. As far back as 1987, when Beebe was a very junior state senator, the Arkansas Times
asked “Is This the Next Bill Clinton?” and in all the election years
since, followers of politics have discussed whether and when — most
thought it a question of when — Mike Beebe would make his move for
higher office.

As it turned out, Mike Beebe was most certainly not
Bill Clinton in one regard. Clinton leapt up the political ladder as
fast as he could go. Barely out of law school, he ran for Congress in a
race his party didn’t expect to win (and didn’t) but in which he could
gain political capital for later successful races (and did). He was
attorney general at 30, the youngest governor in the nation, president
at 46. Beebe was 60 when he took office last year, Arkansas’s oldest
first-term governor in 75 years.

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Even after Clinton left the governor’s
office and made advancement possible for other Democrats, Beebe
remained in the state Senate — a very prominent senator to people who
knew state government, a man who made the Senate work, but still a
state senator. Political junkies speculated that he lacked the famous
fire in the belly successful politicians are supposed to possess, that
he was afraid to face an opponent (he’d never had one, amazingly), that
he’d used up all the potential a politician is allowed.

Perhaps, it was said, he’s simply
intimidated by Arkansas political history, which reflects that
legislators who run for governor don’t do well. Some of the thousands
of votes that legislators cast are sure to be thrown back at them. And
those unpopular votes may be all they’re remembered for. Legislators
are familiar to the media, the lobbyists and the hard-core fans of
politics, but they are not well known to the general public, even if,
like Beebe, they’ve also served a term as attorney general.

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Beebe says now that it was other
people, not him, who did most of the talking about his advancing to
higher office. He might still be a senator today, he says, had not the
voters imposed term limits in 1992.

 “I was content,” he says. “I had the
best of both worlds. I had a real, satisfying job [as a highly
successful lawyer], I was making money [in quantities perhaps
especially gratifying to one who’d been a poor boy], but I also had a
say in public policy. People talked to me about running for higher
office, but I didn’t fan the flames.” As a teen-ager, he’d thought
about being a U.S. senator, and, like Clinton, he had a hero. The same
one, in fact — John F. Kennedy. Pictures of President Kennedy adorn the
governor’s office.

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“But as you grow older, your youthful
ambition becomes tempered,” Beebe says, denying aspirations to higher
office now. “I love where I am.”

 

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The story of Beebe’s impoverished
childhood — born in a tarpaper shack, moving all over the country with
his waitress mother, settling in Newport long enough to graduate from
high school — was comprehensively told in the 2006 governor’s race.
With ambition, and assistance, young Beebe made it to Arkansas State
University in Jonesboro and then to the University of Arkansas Law
School at Fayetteville. He had a vague notion of becoming an FBI agent.
While he was in law school, he got a summer job with a Searcy law firm.
He liked the people in the office, he liked the town; after graduation,
he joined the firm full time. This was a fateful decision.

The firm then known as Lightle and
Tedder was a political law firm, of a sort found in many towns across
Arkansas. The senior partner was Ed Lightle, who’d served a few terms
in the state Senate before retiring undefeated. Cecil Tedder would soon
be elected circuit judge. A young associate, Jim Hannah, would become a
chancery judge, and later chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

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Beebe won some big lawsuits right away,
according to state Sen. John Paul Capps of Searcy, who was a state
representative in those days and now holds the Senate seat that was
Beebe’s. The two men became close friends. “For about 16 years, we
worked together on legislative issues and we never had a cross word,”
Capps says. There’s a crosstown expressway in Searcy called the
Beebe-Capps Expressway.

Beebe says he didn’t join the Lightle
firm because of its political connections, but he made rather quick use
of them nonetheless. An opening appeared on the Board of Trustees at
ASU. With the controlled brashness he seems to have always had, Beebe
saw no reason why a 25-year-old shouldn’t fill it. Though the goal was
appointment rather than election, Beebe’s quest for a seat on the ASU
Board of Trustees was his first real experience in politics, he says.
He contacted everybody he knew that he thought could be helpful.
Lightle helped, of course. So did Archie Schaffer, a Beebe acquaintance
who was an assistant to Gov. Dale Bumpers, and related to the governor
by marriage.

“The first time I was ever at the
Capitol was to be interviewed by Bumpers for the ASU appointment,”
Beebe says. Bumpers himself had been largely unknown before he was
elected governor. He may have felt a kinship with Beebe. He appointed
him, in any case, and Beebe had acquired a little bigger reputation
than he’d had before. (An unkind observer, an alumnus of the University
of Arkansas at Fayetteville, say, might suggest that the pickings among
ASU grads are generally slim, but such an observation would be rightly
scorned. Incidentally, Governor Beebe won’t push for a football game
between UA and ASU. “Not my job,” he says. “I think it’d be good for
the state, but it’s not something for state government to get involved
in.”)

After every census, the legislature is
redistricted, and so it was after the 1980 census. As always, various
plans, backed by various interests, were under consideration. Searcy
was in a Senate district with Batesville. Although Searcy was bigger,
the Senate seat once held by Lightle now belonged to Sen. Bill Walmsley
of Batesville. According to Walmsley, who still practices law in
Batesville, the only way someone from Independence County could win the
Senate seat was if he had strong connections to White County too. That
fit Walmsley perfectly — he’d grown up in Bald Knob and had relatives
all over eastern White County.

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But Searcy was still growing, faster
than Batesville. One day, Ed Lightle asked Walmsley, “How’d you like to
lose Searcy?” Walmsley said he’d be delighted. Lightle had a young law
partner in mind. (By this time, Tedder and Hannah had left the Lightle
firm for the bench, and Lightle was working only part-time. A young
Beebe was the senior full-time member of the firm.)

The redistricting plan that the
legislature approved in the 1981 session took Searcy out of Walmsley’s
district and put it in a district with Stuttgart. Searcy was bigger
than Stuttgart too, but Stuttgart had an incumbent senator, Bill
Hargrove, who’d said he would seek election in the new district. For
months, Beebe — now a Senate candidate, to no one’s surprise — ran for
the seat as if he had an opponent. Eventually Hargrove withdrew, and
Beebe was elected without opposition. He would be re-elected several
times, and then be elected attorney general, all without opposition,
which says quite a lot about the impression Beebe makes on
people, and the supporters he attracts. He wouldn’t draw an opponent
until the 2006 governor’s race, when Asa Hutchinson confronted him.

When Beebe ran in 2006, some followers
of politics were skeptical of him because he wasn’t associated with any
particular cause. “What is he for?” they asked. He was known as
a fixer, a man who could arrange a compromise on anything, who’d accept
the lesser of two evils. He was friendly — too friendly, some said —
with special interests. As governor, he hired a former poultry industry
lobbyist as his chief of staff. Before he was a lobbyist, Morril
Harriman of Van Buren had been Beebe’s closest friend and ally in the
Senate. Legislatively, the two were virtually inseparable.

Some of the skeptics were persuaded by Beebe’s enthusiastic support from Senate colleagues who were
known for passion and principle. People like Jodie Mahony of El Dorado,
a fighter for public education, and Jay Bradford of Pine Bluff, whose
progressive views made you wonder how an insurance salesman came to
hold them. Bradford, a proponent of mental health programs among other
causes, has been appointed by Beebe as director of behavioral health
services at the state Department of Human Services (DHS). Mahony has
worked on Beebe’s gubernatorial staff.

“He and I started in the Senate
together in 1983,” Bradford says. “It didn’t take me long to realize I
wanted to be on his team, because he was gonna be a real factor.” He
was intelligent, obviously, and he understood the importance of
pleasing the senior senators who could be helpful. Sen. Knox Nelson of
Pine Bluff was a power in the Senate at the time. Nelson quickly
acknowledged Beebe as a comer. Despite winning Nelson’s regard, Beebe
was a leader in a group of young senators who would force a change in
Senate procedures. The old rules allowed powerful members like Nelson
and Max Howell of Jacksonville to chair two or three committees apiece.
The new rules permitted only one chairmanship per senator.

One day during Beebe’s first term, a
reporter happened to be standing nearby when Bill Moore, a longtime
senator from El Dorado, approached Beebe and told him that he was the
only one of the newcomers who observed the old Senate niceties — on
winning recognition to speak, and other such matters. Beebe said
something like “Aw shucks,” and the reporter thought, “He doesn’t miss
many tricks.”

Another trick he didn’t miss was that
of being accessible to the press. Many older senators were wary of
reporters. Beebe (and Harriman) talked to them, with as much candor as
could reasonably be expected. They answered reporters’ phone calls, and
addressed them by their first names.  

Popular and influential though Beebe
became, one senator remained uncharmed. This was Nick Wilson of
Pocahontas, a man who exercised considerable influence himself, partly
because he’d acquired a reputation as somebody not to be messed with.
“I tried to get along with him for a couple of years,” Beebe says. “But
he really didn’t like me.”

The hostility came from a disagreement
over committee assignments. Before the 1980 census, Wilson and Walmsley
had been in a three-senator caucus with Sen. Jim Wood of Newport.
Wilson and Walmsley were good friends, which meant that Wood got the
poorer committee assignments. Redistricting put Wood and Walmsley in
the same legislative district in 1982, and Wood defeated Walmsley.
Redistricting also made Beebe the third member of the caucus with Wood
and Wilson. Wood, who’d been a couple of years behind Beebe at Newport
High School, formed an alliance with the new man, and now it was Wilson
who received the inferior committee assignments. Wood and Beebe even
took away Wilson’s seat on the important Joint Budget Committee and
gave it to Beebe. “He was the first true freshman ever to serve on
Joint Budget,” Wood says. “And it was a perfect fit for him.”

Wilson never forgave the freshman his
audacity. He and Beebe fought for 15 years, until Wilson resigned from
the Senate just ahead of expulsion. He’d been convicted of a felony in
connection with a scheme to defraud the taxpayers.

“Nick was very bright and very
hard-working,” Beebe says. “He was on the right side of a lot of
substantive issues. [Such as abortion rights.] His problem was his
self-dealing. We had suspicions he was up to something, but our
suspicions were all about DHS [the state Department of Human Services].
He was involved in a lot of DHS legislation.” Instead, Wilson fell
because of a scheme involving improper payments to lawyers who were
supposed to do state business in court.

Before he was brought down, “Nick was
vindictive and intimidating,” Beebe says. “But eventually you make
enough enemies that you reach the tipping point.” That meant that in
the crunch, Beebe had more people on his side than Wilson had on his.
Still, “He was as formidable an opponent as I’ve ever had.”

In a striking political paradox,
Beebe’s opponent in the 2006 gubernatorial race, Republican nominee Asa
Hutchinson, accused Beebe of having been in cahoots with Wilson. Beebe
says that during the investigation of the Wilson scandal, an FBI agent
came to Searcy to interview him, and even handed him a subpoena to
testify before a grand jury. He was jolted, and it showed. But the
agent told him not to worry. “She said one thing she’d learned during
the investigation was that a senator was either a Beebe man or a Wilson
man.”

 

There are yet those who’ll say that
Beebe and his Senate partner Harriman had gained such control of the
Senate that they must have known something of what Wilson and his gang
were up to. Beebe says he and Harriman were knowledgeable, and engaged
with the Senate process, but “We weren’t as knowledgeable as people
thought. I had a law firm, a job outside the Senate. We now know that
Nick was full time.”

Nick Wilson aside, Beebe became what
one legislative observer calls the Senate’s traffic cop, not so much an
advocate himself as one who told the advocates when they could go, and
how far. Jay Bradford says, “I was the first one to call him ‘Atlanta.’
He asked me why, and I said ‘Everything has to go through you.’ ”
Bradford was seeking Beebe’s support for a bill, and got it. Beebe
enjoyed being Atlanta, Bradford says, and he also enjoyed being
called that. A bull-in-the-china-shop legislator himself, Bradford says
that Beebe doesn’t make emotional mistakes. And yet for all his cool
calculation, or because of it, he retained the senators’ trust. And he
knew how to use it. Bradford recalls another occasion when he and Beebe
argued — “I’m sure I was taking the more liberal side” — and he said
that Beebe would be unable to win Senate support for what Beebe was
proposing. “He said ‘Jay, I can sell iceboxes to Eskimos.’ ”

So he’s not without ego, but that’s no
surprise. A person doesn’t enter politics without a certain amount of
ego. But he generally keeps it under control, and people who’ve worked
with him say that he believes, like Ronald Reagan, that you can do a
lot if you don’t care who gets the credit. In 2001, a source says,
Beebe was the de facto governor, because the real governor, Mike
Huckabee, couldn’t get anything through the legislature. But Beebe
didn’t talk about it, he just did it.

People also say that he’s a good
listener, has trained himself to listen, and that’s another sign of a
person who doesn’t get carried away with himself.

Sen. Jim Argue of Little Rock remembers
pushing Senator Beebe to support one of Argue’s do-gooder bills. “He
told me I needed to temper my idealism with a little pragmatism. I told
him he needed to inspire his pragmatism with a little idealism.” And
they’ve continued that debate, in friendly fashion, for years. “We both
know you need both. I’m a lot more willing to lose on principle. He’s a
consummate problem solver. He inspires confidence in other people. A
decade ago, I would have told you that the severance tax would never be
raised. And Beebe pulled it off.” (Numerous proposals to raise the
pitifully low severance tax had failed before Beebe won approval of an
increase last year. New factors were in play this time, but it was a
significant accomplishment nonetheless.)

Argue and others say that one reason
Governor Beebe has been so successful with the legislature is that the
legislative branch of government has grown weaker. Term limits prevent
the development of new Senator Beebes.

“He’s the only real hope for preserving
the gains we’ve made in education,” Argue says. Argue and other
legislators deeply involved in the reforms demanded by the courts will
all be gone in a couple of years. Unless Beebe holds the line, new
legislators will be tempted to ease up on accountability requirements
for the schools, Argue said, and to fall into the old rut of funding
other programs at the expense of education. 

U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder of Little Rock
served in the state Senate with Beebe in the ’90s. “He was quick,”
Snyder says. The legislative process can be slow and complicated; Beebe
was known for grasping the key issues rapidly, and finding the
weaknesses in a bill. The Senate Judiciary Committee, of which both he
and Harriman were members, was a graveyard of bad legislation.

For all the bills that he guided
through, with other people’s names on them, Beebe himself didn’t
sponsor many. Snyder recalls, gleefully, being on the Agriculture
Committee when Beebe brought one of his bills before it. “We asked a
lot of questions, and he finally pulled the bill back. It was clear he
didn’t enjoy having his bills picked apart either.”

But Beebe was always available to help
other senators with their legislation, and if he couldn’t support it,
to carefully and tactfully explain why, Snyder says.  “He didn’t burn
any bridges.”

There was something else Snyder
appreciated about Beebe. They were both raised by single women, with no
child support. Both acknowledged that had it not been for public
schools, public health, government loans, G.I. bills, etc., “We would
never have been able to do anything.”

“Here he is in his 60s now, and it’s
still very much in his mind what would be good for the kids of
Arkansas. He’s well grounded in where he came from.”

 

 

Liberals have been watching Governor
Beebe closely for signs of excessive influence by special interests. To
date, they haven’t seen it. “He’s kind of surprised me, the things he’s
done in the way of a progressive agenda,” says former state Rep. Sam
Ledbetter of Little Rock. Working behind the scenes, mostly, Beebe
blocked legislative approval of a bill to bar homosexuals from adopting
or serving as foster parents, and he’s said he opposes a proposed
constitutional amendment to do the same thing. He’s also announced his
opposition to a proposed amendment to deny services to illegal aliens,
and that stance too carries political risk.

“On environmental stuff, he’s been darn
good,” Ledbetter says. “When it comes down to taking care of industry
or taking care of the environment, he takes care of the environment.”

There’s been hardly any harsh criticism
of Beebe, and that’s unusual. Reportedly, a recent poll showed him with
an approval rating that was breathtakingly high.

“He’s as popular as any governor I’ve known,” Wood says. “I might use the word ‘beloved.’ ”

 

Beebe is proud of his pragmatism,
untroubled that he’s not known as a crusader. “I get criticized from
those on the extreme left and those on the extreme right. I try to find
a solution that’s good public policy.” But, he adds, “I feel very
strongly about a lot of issues, education the first, because it was of
such value to me.”

Asked to name the major accomplishments
of his administration so far, the first thing he points to is
education, the making of improvements so that the public school system
is finally in compliance with the letter and the spirit of court
requirements. He cites the severance tax, and a reduction in the state
sales tax on groceries, with an eye toward repealing it entirely.
Reduction and/or repeal of the grocery tax was another project at which
other governors and other legislatures had failed. Beebe carefully, and
characteristically, notes the legislature’s role in all this success.

He mentions another accomplishment,
less tangible but, to Beebe, just as important. “We’ve created a
climate where everybody is engaged, everybody is working together.
That’s important.” The legislative and executive branches did not work
well together during the administration of his predecessor.

Asked what’s hard about being governor,
Beebe says it’s making calls to the widows and mothers of Arkansas
soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I’m glad I don’t have to make
the initial call. The military does that.” His questioner was unaware
this was even part of the governor’s job. It’s not mandated, he says,
but he feels the governor should convey the state’s sympathy.
Especially in the case of National Guardsmen — the governor is
commander in chief of the Guard.

Setting execution dates is another
difficult task, “no matter how heinous the crime, and even though the
person was convicted and sentenced in a court of law.”

But it’s all part of the job, and the
job needs doing, and defending. A great cynicism has descended on the
country, Beebe says, and “All of us are under an obligation to try to
restore faith in our institutions. Cynics say that all politicians are
crooks and liars. That’s as dangerous to our democracy as just about
anything.

“Restoring people’s faith in the
institutions of the best form of self-governance ever created is a
worthy cause. If you want to plant a flag on me for a cause, that’s a
good one to plant.”

He grows on you.

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