By John Brummett

Here is the one-two-three of what happened Tuesday:

1. It was fear and anger over the precarious state of the economy, the perilous state of the federal treasury and the impotence of those in office in confronting those dire conditions.

2. It was a repudiation of health care reform, which was a colossal political blunder. It seemed to consume Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi at a time when Americans were losing their jobs or fretting that they might lose them.

3. Arkansas is forever changed. Its steady conversion from a static one-party Democratic rural culture to a suburban or metropolitan Republican one has been accelerated by these special circumstances. Already we were a state in which traditional Democratic regions were withering and new Republican ones exploding and where our politics as usual was getting sustained artificially by inertia. Now the evolution is suddenly less incremental and more profound.

Taking those in order:

Nationwide exit polls showed that one in three respondents said they had experienced a job loss over the last two years in their own households. These respondents did not think the government was responding sufficiently or effectively, but, instead, was obsessed with health care.

These respondents thought health care reform was less a safety net in case they lost their jobs than a drain on businesses that might provide jobs.

So 40 percent of them said they were independents and, of those, only 8 percent had a favorable opinion of Pelosi.

Republicans do not want to hear this and they will not accept it, but here it is: These exit-poll respondents had a 53 percent disapproval rating for Democrats and a 53 percent disapproval rating for Republicans. Their anger was less at Democrats specially than against politicians who seem to have failed. So the Democrats, controlling all of government, bore the brunt.

Regarding health care, I do not mean to be a Monday morning quarterback. Actually, I was a Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon quarterback — a real-time quarterback — on this one.

I wrote it at the time: After Massachusetts of all places went Republican for Ted Kennedy’s seat, Obama and Pelosi should have shelved health care reform and honed in, somehow, on jobs, jobs, jobs.

They were influenced otherwise by a sense of history and by a liberal Democratic base that desperately wanted long-awaited health care reform to be achieved at long last. But what they ended up with was an over-compromised mishmash that had no clarity or fervent constituency.

This is a center-right country in which a Democrat can occasionally win the presidency if the Republicans blunder and if that Democrat is inspiring or especially talented. But these Democratic presidents will inevitably fail if they seek to appease the agenda of the liberal base.

Now regarding Arkansas: The best way to explain what has happened is to look at Republican Rick Crawford’s win over Democrat Chad Causey to give the 1st District, land of Delta farmers and high concentrations of African-American voters, its first Republican congressman since 1870 and Reconstruction.

Causey won good margins along the river in the traditional Delta. Crawford won the race in three counties — Craighead, where there has been growth; Lonoke County, which is now a Little Rock suburb and conservative Republican hotbed; and Baxter County, which, until redistricting a decade ago forced the 1st to pick up new areas because of lost population, was a confirmed part of the Republican hotbed of Northwest Arkansas.

This is not your father’s 1st District.

Combine that with the growing influence of Northwest Arkansas and the Pulaski County suburbs, and, indeed, this is not your father’s state.

Gov. Mike Beebe, popular as he is, will be less the emperor next year as he inhabits a state Capitol in which 44 or 45 of the 100 House members are Republicans and the guy who becomes governor whenever he goes out of state is a Republican pizza mogul.

Some things that were going to happen eventually happened immediately. That’s the story in Arkansas.

I always said we were Alabama just waiting to happen. So Alabama happened.

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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.