By John Brummett

Jim Keet may be onto something in his daunting Republican challenge to Gov. Mike Beebe’s re-election.

He has some substance on his side. He has a lot more good timing on his side.

He says that Beebe, a four-decade veteran policy leader of state government, is “chairman of the board of the good ol’ boy network.”

He says this network depletes taxpayer money entirely too carelessly and habitually — for cars for state employee use, for airplanes for gubernatorial use and for state agency budgets that automatically use existing spending levels as next year’s foundation.

He says that Beebe’s government spends money in ways that are long-embedded and sustained mostly by inertia, but not accountable in their efficiency.

He says, yes, he understands that Beebe is drawing down the grocery tax. But he notices that Beebe has still increased state government employment. And he still accuses Beebe of squandering the surplus he inherited, likening it to a child’s buying everything it wants on the parents’ credit card. (The Rockefeller Cancer Center at UAMS, to be dedicated Friday, likely is something more substantial than a child’s plastic-card purchase.)

Keet says it’s time to put a businessman in the governor’s office and shake up the status quo with tools and tactics he’s used as a business chief executive officer. He refers to interdepartmental accountability standards and directives to agencies to come back with a plan for doing the same task with 95 employees instead of a hundred.

He is running to be the state bean-counter, the state miser. His “vision thing” is of econo-government.

Keet wants to turn Beebe’s most potent asset — his experience as a competent leader of all that is state government — against him. He wants to take all the taxpayer SUVs and all the taxpayer automobiles and the taxpayer airplane and pile them on Beebe’s back.

It doesn’t matter that Republican Mike Huckabee governed much the same way before Beebe. Keet isn’t running against Huckabee. He’s running right now.

The substance of all that is nuanced and complicated. The timing isn’t. The timing is simple. The timing is compelling.

I refer to this ongoing brouhaha about state constitutional officers driving around in taxpayer SUVs for personal use and neither reimbursing the state nor paying state or federal income taxes.

I refer further to the follow-up article in the statewide daily that counted 8,653 or 8,654 state government vehicles used by about 55,000 state employees, one car for every seven employees, give or take.

Those are the kinds of plain and powerful things that energize the public and galvanize opinion.

Beebe, returning my call the day after I spoke with Keet on this subject, said the one-in-seven statistic is misleading, including as it does law enforcement agencies, where the ratio is one-to-one, and agencies independent of his executive authority such as highways (including dump trucks), game and fish and higher education.

He also said this idea that budgets get done by inertia might once have been true, but isn’t anymore now that he’s having to deal with declining revenues owing to the economy. But he acknowledges that the sheer number of vehicles is striking and says he is deep into the process of gathering the facts before making a move.

Still, you have to think some of those cars are inessential. And it’s a fact that the outlay for them gets built into ongoing budgets year to year, and that specific accountability sometimes gets assumed, thus lost.

Keet wants to make something of Beebe’s going along with the $4.4 million purchase of a new airplane for the State Police that sometimes provides governor’s transportation. The new plane was purchased because the old one was worn out, in part because of Huckabee’s far-greater use of it than is the case with Beebe and the new one.

Keet’s point is that the governor doesn’t need a state-owned plane in the first place. As governor, he would fly commercial coach, he says. If the State Police objects for security reasons, then, he says, an aircraft could be leased for less than the cost of maintaining what he calls a “hangar queen.”

It’s ironic. Beebe flies sparingly on this new aircraft that replaced one overused by Huckabee, and now Keet seeks to turn the entire issue on Beebe.

It’s all timing. For everything there is a season. And this is the season for taxpayers to be irked about modes of transportation in state government.

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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.