By John Brummett

In the progressive days of Dale Bumpers and media dominance by the liberal Arkansas Gazette, Democrats in Arkansas didn’t run from their national party as they do now.

That’s what some of my liberal friends say, anyway. But they’re mistaken.

The difference is that now the Arkansas Democrat must run harder and faster.

But the dichotomy itself is actually an old and familiar one.

In 1972, Bumpers was spectacularly popular in progressively minded Arkansas, opposed for election to a second term as governor only perfunctorily by a sacrificial Republican, Len Blaylock. Bumpers would beat Blaylock by 75-25.

But Bumpers told a news conference that year that he had too much to worry about in his own race to get involved in behalf of the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, who lost Arkansas to Richard Nixon by 32-68.

Bumpers did distinguish himself among Southern governors by receiving McGovern at the Governor’s Mansion. In Southern politics of 1972, that passed for liberal courage. By contrast, a Georgia Democratic governor named Jimmy Carter was openly saying McGovern was too liberal for his state.

There are plenty of other examples of prominent Arkansas Democrats distancing themselves at home from the national interests they often served:

— David Pryor was about as liberal as Bumpers, but he hid it deftly in such amorphous concepts as standing up for old people in nursing homes and championing a taxpayer bill of rights.

— Bill Alexander rose to leadership in the liberal Democratic House of Representatives, but, back home in his conservative 1st District, he championed farmers over environmentalists in wanting to turn the Cache River into a ditch. (It should be noted that Bumpers, an exception proving the rule, opposed the Cache project.)

— Beryl Anthony was rising to leadership in that same Democratic House, but, back home in his conservative 4th District, he came straight out of the region’s conservative power center, meaning the timber industry.

— J. William Fulbright let loose his anti-war liberalism during the Vietnam War. For decades he got by politically by voting strictly Southern on civil rights issues and portraying himself at home as Just Plain Bill.

But then Fulbright got beat, badly. That was by Bumpers, two years after he supposedly was too worried about Blaylock’s anemic challenge to make an investment in the Democratic presidential campaign of the famously anti-war McGovern.

Bumpers didn’t run against Fulbright’s anti-war views. He didn’t need to do that, and, in truth, he didn’t oppose them.

He merely put his name on the ballot, skirted issues, avoided debates and coasted to the easy victory that was inevitable from his at-home gubernatorial popularity as contrasted with Fulbright’s seeming national liberalism.

What’s different now is Fox News and the Internet and the introduction of special interest dollars for issue-oriented attack advertising. In a nation made smaller and much more connected, and where billions of dollars flow, you can’t so easily separate your national identity from your state one.

So an age-old finesse becomes much tougher for Blanche Lincoln running for re-election a year into Barack Obama’s presidency.

It’s why she’s coming out against Obama’s proposed farm subsidy cuts and trying to get the Republican senatorial candidates to side with her party’s president. That would be an irony if it wasn’t Arkansas politics.

Consider that Obama is the only Democratic president in more than three decades not to come from the South and thus offer, like Bill Clinton and Carter, some measure of geographical cover for Arkansas Democrats. Obama gives Arkansas Democrats all the heartburn of a culturally liberal association, but none of the good ol’ boy mitigation.

Obama has moved the very earth under the state’s Democrats.

He has talked of being a transformational president. He may not have meant 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.