By John Brummett

Dave Bisbee strikes me as far more likely to be guilty of an autocratic style than ethical misconduct.

He’s a guy who, with condescending impatience, even exasperation, might well say, “Here, let me handle this. Y’all don’t know anything about remodeling.”

That’s how I size up this matter of Bisbee, a building contractor and now the Benton County judge, bringing in his own company, Valley Homes, for a $15,443 job to remodel the assessor and collector’s offices. That’s after someone else had proposed to do it for $16,560.

I don’t think Bisbee is enriching himself. He says the treasurer and collector found the first price too high and sought his help. He says he’s handing that little remodeling company over to an employee and won’t see a penny.

He says he knows the work and that the first price was indeed high. He says he knows this guy he’s bringing in. He says the guy is good. He says he’s saving the county a thousand or so dollars.

He asks what your lame-brained point is.

The point is that he owes taxpayers open and objective procedures to assure them of propriety. The other point is that appearances count.

But procedures and appearances sometimes can get in the way of the haughty know-it-all.

It’s not an ethics deal. It’s a smart-aleck deal.

But some of Bisbee’s quorum court members don’t see the effective difference and are calling for an investigation. The guy who loses a job to find that the county judge has privately undercut him by $1,100 — well, he may have a bad taste in his mouth about local politics, understandably.

A condescending, autocratic style is part of what kept Bisbee from becoming the first Republican president pro tem of the state Senate.

After a distinguished career there in which he’d learned to work smartly in a pragmatic and bipartisan way with the moderate likes of Mike Beebe and the liberal likes of Jim Argue, Bisbee got undercut by several less-effective Republican senators.

Led by Gilbert Baker, these lesser senators formed a self-named “Brotherhood” with conservative Democratic senators like Bob Johnson and wrested control of the Senate and delivered the honorary leadership position to a minion. Then they divvied up surplus money so they could take it home and feel important with their sidewalks and community centers and play-pretties.

The one element of that coup that I never endeavored to explore — because I liked Bisbee and didn’t want to personalize the matter — was that a lot of those Brotherhood guys simply didn’t appreciate his blustery superior attitude and his talking down to them.

He’d say things like, “If I had more time, I could make a senator out of him.”

News people tended to like Bisbee because he’d give them a quote if they asked him a question. Brutal candor, some call it. It’s refreshing. It’s fun. It’s not always the best political tack.

So now Gilbert Baker is the apparent front-runner for the Republican nomination for the U. S. Senate. Bisbee is vowing to do everything he can to make sure his Benton Countians reject the little back-stabbing runt (my words, not Bisbee’s, so far as I know).

And I’m suspecting that Benton County Republicans aren’t going to let Dave Bisbee cast their Senate vote for them, as much as he’d like to do it and as confident as he surely is that he’d do a real good job of it.

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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.