By John Brummett

Let’s pretend I’m three things I’m not, those being young, conservative and an Arkansas Republican.

Let’s further pretend that, assuming those things, I’m willing to fly the requisite Republican kamikaze mission of opposing Gov. Mike Beebe’s re-election next year.

How might I possibly get the plane off the ground? How might I fashion any kind of candidacy other than laughable?

This is not to suggest that Beebe ought to be beaten. Don’t put me in that pitiable little ostracized minority. And I’m not saying he shouldn’t be beaten either.

I’m just considering that somebody actually will have to do this. If the Republicans don’t produce a gubernatorial candidate and cop 3 percent of the vote, then they’ll lose automatic standing on the ballot. That means they’d be down there with the Greens and the Libertarians and the independents, circulating petitions to try to get a candidate qualified.

Winning is out of the question and thus not a factor. That we can say confidently.

Beebe has been cited by a credible national publication as the best governor in America. He has managed to grow government in popular ways, using the surplus he inherited from Mike Huckabee and then higher severance taxes on natural gas for highways and higher cigarette taxes to save lives in new trauma centers. He has done all that while pushing through the biggest volume tax cut in the state’s history, a four-cent drawdown in the previously six-cent sales tax on groceries.

The latest monthly revenue reports are troubling in their decline from the year before. But, if forced to make unpopular cuts, Beebe will get excused on account of unavoidable circumstances out of his control. All the fault, or so Arkansas voters are likely to surmise, will be Barack Obama’s.

An out-of-state pollster recently found Beebe to be the first Democrat in the firm’s history to poll higher among white people than black people, not that he appeared to have any trouble with black people.

He declined to take a pay raise. He came out against those outrageous lottery official salaries. He told tone-deaf legislators “no” on building a tunnel so that they could have new offices.

“If you’re just out there in the state reading the paper,” one Republican said to me, “then it looks to you like Mike Beebe is the only guy in Little Rock with any sense.”

Clint Reed, a well-wired Republican political consultant in Little Rock, told me this: “Mike Beebe is going to get re-elected, probably with 70 percent.”

What Republicans ought to do, Reed said, is run someone in noble opposition to him advancing a positive and economically conservative alternative and eschewing the typical attack-oriented negativity that, when you think about, has almost always failed, even boomeranged, in Arkansas gubernatorial politics.

Reed said Republicans will not do themselves any good launching broadsides on Beebe personally or over prison snafus or public retirement controversies or higher taxes. “And it’s not going to be about gays or abortion, either, at the state level,” he said.

Doyle Webb, state Republican chairman, can attest on the matter of gays. He trotted out the following little line of attack a couple of months ago: Unless the state’s voters turned out enough Democratic state legislators to fashion a Republican majority, then a lesbian, state Rep. Kathy Webb of Little Rock, might become chairman of the Joint Budget Committee.

That blew up in his face, to the point that he readily concedes that he won’t be venturing into that kind of rhetoric again.

Arkansas voters will deny general rights to gays, such as to marry or adopt children. But the idea that a voter should couch his selection of a local legislator in a strategically targeted attack on one woman whose sexual orientation would seem to have nothing to do with making a budget — well, prejudice is easier when it’s impersonal. Let’s put it that way.

Anyway, culture-war issues and those of typical left-and-right divides have always been mostly irrelevant at the state level in Arkansas. They apply at the national level. You might make a little hay using them in a congressional race. Not so for governor.

But here’s the most important thing Reed said: Beebe might get 70 percent.

Notice what he did. He set a high threshold. He sought to define the race in a way in which a Republican candidate could get beat by something more reasonable and likely, but still a serous drubbing — 61-39, say  —and claim a kind of victory.

Politics is all about expectations, and the lower the better. Bill Clinton famously lost his first race for public office, but, by getting nearly 48 percent against John Paul Hammerschmidt for Congress in a heavily Republican region, he managed a defeat that propelled him to attorney general, governor and president.

That is to say this might be an occasion for a young Arkansas Republican to establish himself or herself in a way not otherwise possible. It might be an occasion to seek a reasonably attainable victory of sorts over absurdly low expectations. It might be an occasion for a Republican to get some attention — in the statewide press, in at least one debate with Beebe on statewide television — that he or she could never get otherwise.

It might be timely, actually, to start the argument for a new paradigm in Arkansas politics and government, one that would end the steady growth of state government in a quasi-liberal era, spanning Democrats and Republicans alike — Winthrop Rockeller, Dale Bumpers, Bill Clinton, Huckabee (yes, he, too, was a quasi-liberal, fiscally speaking) and Beebe.

As Reed explained, pocketbook issues are dominant, especially now. That’s all because of federal issues — the economy, the stimulus, health care, the deficit and debt. But a savvy Republican could seek to apply them at the state level, particularly with budget shortages threatening.

The point would not be to try to paint Beebe as a liberal or go negative against him personally. The point would be to begin making a broader philosophical and economic case. It’s that maybe, for once, we could get through a legislative session that wasn’t about raising some tax or fee and spending more money next year than we spent last year, all the while leaving enough unspent to produce the usual “surplus” for politicians to play with.

Perhaps we’re getting somewhere, if you like economic conservatism, that is.

So, first, let’s talk about what I, as this supposed young conservative Republican flying this kamikaze mission, should dare not do.

To begin: I should not be mean toward Beebe personally or suggest any corruption or malfeasance on his part.

That has been a futile game plan for decades in Arkansas gubernatorial politics, for two reasons. One is that a governor’s race is detached from the usual wedge issues of modern politics. The other is that, in a state that is not so much one-party as no-party, and small to the point that people like to get to know their governor, politics becomes a cult of personality.

A race for the Governor’s Mansion, especially, can come down to a personal popularity contest. The one calling the other mean names tends to be the one seen as unarmed in a person popularity contest.

Anyway, the most obvious attacks on Beebe would be altogether unfair or futile.

Do I call him a tax-raiser? If I do, he responds that he only pushed through the biggest tax decrease in the state’s history. Of the two taxes I had in mind, he could say this: The rise in the natural gas severance tax was a matter of negotiated agreement with the industry and won the votes of Republicans in the Legislature. The increase in cigarette taxes was for health care and better emergency rooms.

He might ask me which it was: Did I oppose better emergency rooms or did I just want to make it easier for kids to smoke?

Some Republicans have discussed going negative against Beebe over prison escapes and abuse, specifically for his failure to fire anybody as a result. But does anyone really think Beebe is in favor of prison escape and prisoner abuse — that he wants to mistreat inmates so that can stand idly by and let them run away? People seem to understand and accept that prison business is altogether unseemly.

Other Republicans have been heard to suggest that Beebe is vulnerable in the matter of double-dipping in the state’s public retirement systems. It is true that the most egregious incidents, by which a few county elected officials retired only on paper while they stayed on the job so that they could cash checks twice, happened while he was governor. But county government is independent of state government. And the pattern of double-dipping, both in the public employee and teacher retirement systems, preceded his governorship. In both cases, the systems have been tightened by legislation signed during his governorship.

Here’s something else I dare not do: I must avoid that trap that Asa Hutchinson fell into by pandering to rural Arkansas over school consolidation by appearing to want to retreat on tough new school standards. Hutchinson wound up losing even the endorsement of the statewide Republican paper, a natural and powerful ally for a Republican. It was because the paper’s editorial board was more impressed with Beebe than Hutchinson in terms of committing to education.

And there’s basic cynical math to apply here: There are not enough votes in a tiny-school community to matter.

Better, then, for me to be nice, positive, personable, even charismatic, if I can.

Better if I say, “I like Mike Beebe. He’s done some good things. But he’s been around state government for nigh unto 30 years now. He’s trained, and trained very well, in the comfort of the way things have always been. But I’d like to start a new conversation in Arkansas. I’d like to talk about we might do things with your tax money that would be different, better, more responsive and responsible. Mike Beebe is a good governor for a state on cruise control, one that grows every year and builds in enough of that growth to make sure politicians collect surpluses of your funds so they can celebrate themselves with pork-barrel spending. I’m talking about shifting gears, even our basic direction, to get state government out of the business of surpluses for tax-receivers and into the business of economic growth for taxpayers. Nothing lasts forever, and what was once an era of progress in Arkansas has turned into an era of inertia. Mike Beebe is logically the last governor of that era. He came up through it and distinguished himself for competence and expertise in it. I congratulate him. But it’s time for us to get out of our rut. I want to be the first governor of a new era. Remember: No more surpluses for tax-receivers. New economic growth for taxpayers.”

Implicit would be that the new era actually would begin four years hence, in 2014, in a campaign against either Mike Ross, Dustin McDaniel or Bill Halter, and that I’d just be warming up this time.

Perhaps you want specifics, a few details to support that rhetoric about ending an era of government surpluses by inertia and starting one of economic growth for the people by a new paradigm.

All right, then, I’ll give you specifics, with the obvious proviso that this is an intellectual exercise, not genuine advocacy, and that it might be that I don’t really buy much of what I’m getting ready to say.

But what I do buy is vigorous public policy debate and viable political competition. And what I do buy politically is that pocketbook issues matter more than any others.

So how’s this for a program?

TAXES

We must lower them. Beebe is to be commended for taking the immoral tax on groceries down by two-thirds. But if something is immoral, why cling to a third of it? Let’s take the sales tax off groceries altogether.

Meantime, our top and prevailing personal income tax rate, at 7 percent, is the highest in our region. Two of our bordering neighbors don’t tax personal income at all and no other bordering state has a higher rate for any income level exceeding 6 percent. How can we expect to be fully competitive economically if we take more income for taxes than any state around us?

Just as Beebe justified his natural gas severance tax increase by saying we needed to be in line with surrounding states, let’s get in line, as well, on personal income taxes. For starters, let’s reduce our top income rate to 6 percent so that, at the very least, we’ll not be conspicuous in our region for the most confiscatory tax practices.
                                                                                                                               
GENERAL REVENUE SPENDING

If you are going to lower taxes, then you are going to have to lower spending. That is where the hard work has never been done in state government. It has been easier to keep the finances on cruise control.

First things first: It is not the job of government to accumulate surpluses so that the politicians can bring home self-aggrandizing play-pretties. Let’s raise and spend only what we need to operate state government efficiently and well.

Second: A governor’s job, it has been said, is to “educate, medicate and incarcerate.” So no cuts will be made in our vital expenditures to public schools, for Medicaid and to build and maintain sufficient prisons.

Beyond that, though, it is time to try again something a Republican governor, the late Frank White, tried to do in 1981. It was to tell state general revenue agencies to get by for the next year on what he called “continuing level minus 5 percent.” That is to say that we apply an inflationary factor to last year’s budget, then take that number down by 5 percent.

Yes, that would apply to institutions of higher education, which, please understand, enjoy private gifts and endowments and benefit both from tuition increases and great latitude in what we permit them to raise on campus through student fees. Our new lottery, speaking of incessant state government growth, will be delivering them new students galore, most likely.

This won’t be easy. But it wasn’t easy when we were forced to behold, at the University of Central Arkansas, the extent to which things can get out of hand with unbridled higher education spending and oversight.

And, yes, we’re talking about cutting back spending, but not, we can provide by efficient management, real services, in the State Police. And we’re talking about holding the line on state employment and state employee salaries and expenses in the same way the private sector has had to drawn the line in this recession-laden economy.

Finally, we’re talking about fiscal discipline, common sense and decency. There is no way in the wide world anybody in state government ought to be talking about building a $2 million tunnel right now, not with taxpayers deferring needed household maintenance every day.

Having these new annual sessions for budgeting ought to give us an opportunity to add greater efficiency and accountability.

SPECIAL REVENUE SPENDING

Our main special revenue is highway money. It is time to change the way we govern and fund highways in Arkansas.

Over-reacting to a supposed scandal, we adopted a constitutional amendment in the late 1940s creating a five-member Highway Commission that was wholly autonomous. The supposed purpose was to take politics out of highways.

But the five appointed and independent commissioners attend to the politics of the regions they represent. They serve antiquated districts drawn in an earlier time that no longer reflect the population and driving patterns of the state.

We can’t divorce highways from politics any more than we can divorce politics from anything else in state government. What we can strive for, though, is more expansive and efficient and accountable and contemporary politics, rather than regional and exclusive and unaccountable and old-time politics.

This will require amending our state Constitution. It’s time for the voters to be given this opportunity. Let’s create a new highway department that is part of the general executive branch headed by the popularly elected governor. Let’s appoint some commissioners to represent modern districts and others to represent state interests at large. And let’s start directing money by two priorities and in two directions — to where the traffic is and to where the economic development need is, not to an equal divvying up among five overly powerful commissioners serving yesterday’s Arkansas.

So how about it? I know you’re not going to vote for me, not this time anyway. But maybe you’re thinking in a way you hadn’t previously. And maybe Beebe would have to respond and account in a way he wouldn’t otherwise be compelled.

Anyway, all I’m trying to do is get above Clint Reed’s threshold of 30 percent, at which point I’ll spike the ball and do an end-zone dance.