By John Brummett
A few days after state Sen. Kim Hendren of Gravette had announced his Republican candidacy for the U.S. Senate next year, state Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway was explaining to me how he essentially seemed squeezed out of a race he wasn’t all that keen on making anyway.
Hendren had two distinct advantages, as Baker saw it.
First, Hendren had plenty of money and had declared his willingness to spend a million dollars of it. Baker had no such wealth.
Second, Hendren came from that Republican hotbed of Northwest Arkansas, two counties of which (Benton and Washington) would produce perhaps a fourth to a fifth of statewide Republican primary votes.
Baker believed a primary would be healthy, but noted that one seemed assured with or without him. He looked to Little Rock and saw three possible candidates: Karl Rove operative Tim Griffin, banker French Hill and biotech food executive Curtis Coleman, a former Baptist preacher and one of Mike Huckabee’s closest pals.
With a young child still at home, Baker made a good case for his staying put. He had just survived Mike Beebe’s targeting and handily won re-election to the state Senate in Faulkner County. He was uncommonly perched for a legislative Republican as co-chairman of the Joint Budget Committee. Life was good.
I told him I thought I’d blog it — that he wouldn’t run. And he got agitated. His voice rose. He said, hey, let me make my own announcements in my own time.
Maybe he had an idea Hendren might implode and that those Little Rock prospects were improbable or weak.
Hendren soon referred to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York as “that Jew.” He probably won’t even file. Griffin never was serious about running. He’s an operative, not a candidate. French Hill is a Bushian banker, meaning he starts with a count of no balls and two strikes. Lately he’s being talked about as a challenger to Vic Snyder for Congress in the 2nd District.
Only Coleman looks like he’ll run. All he’ll do is contest Baker for Republican pragmatists in the Huckabee mold — all 15 of them — and cede everything on the right, from the Hutchinson wing all the way to the Jim Holt wing.
In other words, Baker is no longer squeezed. Quite the contrary, the Red Sea has parted for him. Now he’s the great Republican hope. Now I’m thinking he could win a three- or four-person primary without a runoff and without having to pander to the kooky extreme right, since no candidate other than the imploded Hendren seems likely out of the northwestern corner and any remaining prospects are little-known and politically inexperienced.
Baker is uncommonly energetic. He is personable. He has this ability to straddle the philosophical right and the pragmatic center. He can raise money. He stared down Mike Beebe’s challenger to him and beat him by 10 points.
He could give Blanche Lincoln a race. He’d probably lose, but only because Arkansas Republicans don’t know how to go into the rural areas of eastern and southern Arkansas and connect with white conservatives, mainly farmers.
Meantime, Republicans are strategizing that Baker could pull a good vote in Central Arkansas and that some challenger to Snyder could ride those coat-tails in a congressional battle. That’s why they’ve targeted Snyder’s district among 17 nationwide for attack ads and robo calls on Nancy Pelosi.
All of that is to say that, all of a sudden, next year looks conceivably interesting — mildly, at least — in Arkansas politics.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
