By John Brummett

Dick Morris knows Arkansas politics. No one else can lay claim to being an intimate strategic adviser to both our state’s most famous recent governors, meaning Bill Clinton of the Democrats, who became president, and Mike Huckabee of the Republicans, who — panic alert — might yet become president.

Somehow Bill and Hillary fell in early with this abrasive conservative political consultant out of Connecticut. For years Morris worked only for Republicans except for the Clintons, whose political instincts he apparently respected and whose retail talents he apparently admired and whose willingness to do what it took he apparently appreciated.

Once, it has been written, Clinton almost slugged Morris when they got into it about something — probably a level of cynicism Clinton didn’t want to exceed — at the Governor’s Mansion.

Another time, it has been written, Hillary wanted to get a swimming pool built at the Governor’s Mansion, and Morris told her, quite accurately, that she was surely out of her mind to propose such a luxury as that in the seat of government of a poor and populist state.

With Clinton’s presidency on the canvas after the mid-term elections of 1994, Hillary sent for Morris, who initially got through to Clinton on the phone, and around George Stephanopoulos, by calling himself “Charlie.” By 1996, Morris was Clinton’s evident Svengali, directing him on this “triangulation” by which Clinton tacked to the right and declared the era of big government over, which, it turned out, was comically false.

Then, on the day Clinton was to accept his party’s nomination for a second term in Chicago, Morris got found out frequenting a prostitute and having some sort of toe-sucking interest. Only then did Clinton split the sheet.

Meantime, Morris had been advising Huckabee back in Arkansas.

So we should pay attention when Morris breezes into the state as a paid agent of some anti-health reform outfit and says the days in which Arkansas Democrats can get elected by distancing themselves at home from national liberal Democrats — meaning the very essence of Arkansas Democratic politics — are over.

Morris is not absolutely right. Marion Berry can survive in the 1st District by voting with Barack Obama and health care. Mark Pryor can survive by name and legacy. Mike Ross can survive by voting against Obama on health care and continuing to fire his guns with the NRA.

But Morris is right in identifying a reddening trend in Arkansas and by making the point that Obama is so disliked here, and the exploding deficit and government health care so feared, that it’s not as easy as it used to be for a Democrat to steer clear.

These are the relevant cases in point: U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln and U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder in the 2nd District of central Arkansas.

Lincoln ought not to be in such trouble. She has maintained a centrist voting record and stayed closely in touch with, and of great service to, the state’s farm community. Yet she languishes. It’s all because Obama and the health care issue are uncommon drags on her at the very time she must stand for re-election.

Snyder has been re-elected time and again by reaping giant majorities in Pulaski County that overcame his getting beat even by incompetent Republicans in the suburban counties such as Saline, Faulkner and White.

One of these days Snyder may look up and see himself so pummeled in the suburban counties that Pulaski County can’t save him. It’s conceivable that could happen this time, if health care stays on everyone’s mind.

In fact, the imminent decennial census may well show a telling shift in population from the rural and urban areas of Arkansas that remain nominally Democratic to the suburbs which are trending doctrinaire Republican.

So we probably ought to emulate the Clintons. That is to say we should listen to Morris even if we don’t much like him.

——-
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.