By Jason Tolbert
Little Rock restaurant owner Jim Keet says he counts Gov. Mike Beebe as a friend, yet he has the “audacity” to run against him.
Keet gave an explanation Tuesday after filing to run for governor as a Republican. Keet filled out the paperwork in the state Capitol rotunda without the craziness that surrounded Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s filing for re-election just 24 hours earlier. She had been heckled by the conservative Tea Party members and was filing on the heels of her thunder being stolen by Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who announced in an early-morning e-mail that he planned to oppose her in the Democratic Primary. Halter filed a day later, stretching his headline theft to two days.
All was quiet as Keet sat at the filing table prior to making his campaign speech to the media and supporters; beside him was a copy of President Barack Obama’s autobiography, The Audacity of Hope.
Why in the world would a Republican candidate filing for office carry a book by President Obama, who lost the state by 20 points in 2008 and whose popularity has gone down since?
“What’s with the book?” I asked Keet as he walked down the hall to address supporters.
“You will see in a minute,” Keet replied with a grin.
“It’s a prop,” laughed another reporter beside me.
Minutes later, Keet stood in front of a crowd of about 100 cheering supporters as he told them, “I’m Jim Keet. I’m a Republican and I’m running for governor.” His 30-minute speech meandered at times but eventually came back to the book with Obama’s picture on the cover.
“How many of you have ever read President Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope?” asked Keet. “Well, President Obama and Gov. Beebe, I have the audacity to disagree.”
Keet then had the audacity to list his disagreements. He said the Arkansas tax structure is driving jobs and people to other states. To fix it, he wants to raise the state income tax thresholds and eventually eliminate the state capital gains tax altogether. He wants to pay for this by creating efficiencies and weeding out wasteful spending, although he declined to say exactly where.
But the strongest part of the speech was his “audacity to engage the President, Congress, the Legislature or anyone else — Republican or Democrat — who supports through their actions or inactions federal policies that are bankrupting our nation and building up a huge national debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay.”
I asked him afterward if he felt Gov. Beebe did enough of this, and he said he did not, but was quick to point out that it is not about Beebe.
The question remains: What type of campaign strategy does Keet have the audacity to run? Will he play nice in a raise against a friend and save his biggest punches for Washington? Or, will he run hard at Beebe and try to take down his high approval numbers?
Those with political institutional memories longer than mine tell me that Keet has done both. In his 1990 campaign for Congress, Keet ran as the nice guy to Ray Thornton. Keet lost that race. But in 1992, he ran a much tougher campaign against incumbent Democratic State Sen. John Pagan. That one Keet had the audacity to win.
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Jason Tolbert is an accountant and conservative political blogger. His blog — The Tolbert Report — is linked at ArkansasNews.com. His e-mail is jason@TolbertReport.com
