By John Brummett
This will be another in my irregular series comparing and contrasting Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.
I could contend that these columns find their justification in that McDaniel and Halter are engaged already in intense and transparent competition to be the next Democratic gubernatorial nominee after Mike Beebe in 2014.
But the fact is that U.S. Rep. Mike Ross of Prescott might well run and beat them both, and the truth is that mostly I amuse myself by playing McDaniel and Halter against each other.
They’re smart, competent, over-eager and flawed — human, in other words.
Today’s theme will be fatherhood and today’s favorable focus will be on McDaniel.
People have taken to calling Halter the “father of the Arkansas lottery.” It’s an honorific at once grandiose and accurate. We now have a lottery. It could well make a difference in the education of our people over a long term. And Halter did it.
But McDaniel is the father of something, too, and, actually, I find his begetting altogether more impressive.
Arkansawyers had been waiting for years for someone to give them a simple uncluttered lottery for education. They had rejected along the way a succession of proposals to establish casinos and let some self-serving clown run off with the money. Once Halter got such a simple educational lottery on the ballot, the odds were with success.
McDaniel’s parenting, to the contrary, required political finesse, legislative command, deft mediation and, actually, a little political courage.
He is the father of our new animal cruelty felony, which will take effect at the end of this month.
Arkansas remains a rural conservative culture that has a natural resistance to threats, perceived or otherwise, to the way things are.
In this culture, animals get raised and slaughtered and hunted and killed and put to work, all for commercial reasons. Dogs are loved, particularly the athletic Labs that go hard and gleefully into the water to retrieve slain ducks, but they also can be seen, in their rural stray variety, as nuisances.
McDaniel comes from that culture and relies on it. His geographic base is conservative eastern Arkansas. His political and cultural persona is drawn heavily from his affinity for, and adeptness at, hunting.
Still, he chose to confront head-on the succession of legislative and ballot-box failures in proposed laws to create a felony for the most horrid and egregious forms of outright cruelty to dogs and cats and horses. He decided to use his standing as attorney general to bring the parties together — the Farm Bureau from the country and the Humane Society from town — to hammer out a bill and get the Legislature to pass it.
The bill he designed is comprehensive, fair, significant and sufficient. The Legislature passed it overwhelmingly. As of July 31, someone torturing a pet — and it happens at an alarming rate — can be charged with something more serious than a misdemeanor.
There have been concerns raised about the new law lately, from the animal rights side, actually. Kay Simpson, who runs the Pulaski County Humane Society, complained in a piece in the Arkansas Times that we don’t have any money to route to sheriffs and police chiefs to pay for the sheltering and care of animals impounded while charges are pending.
Actually, McDaniel’s new law authorizes the imposition of bonds on people facing animal cruelty charges who harbor any hope of getting their animals back. And even if suspects won’t bother posting a bond, McDaniel tells me we don’t stop prosecuting child abuse because we’re running short on foster homes.
Somebody might object to the analogy, kids and pets, but he’s equating the situations, not the victims.
Score one for Dustin.
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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.
