My life

For all its sweep and new specifics, the program’s central theme was the same one I had been hammering away on for the last six years: “Either we invest more in human capital and develop our people’s capacity to cooperate or we are headed for long-term decline.” Our old strategy of selling Arkansas as a beautiful state with hardworking people, low wages, and low taxes had lost its relevance a decade earlier, due to the new realities of the global economy. We had to keep working to change it. After stumping the state for the rest of the year, I presented the program to the legislature on January 9, 1989. During the speech, I introduced Arkansans who supported it and the increased taxes necessary to pay for it: a school board president who had never voted for me but had been converted to the cause of education reform; a welfare mother who had enrolled in our work program and finished high school, started college, and gotten a job; a World War II veteran who had just learned to read; and the manager of the new $500 million Nekoosa Paper mill in Ashdown, who told the legislators he had to have a better-educated workforce because “our productivity plan requires our workers to know statistics, and a lot of them don’t understand that.”

I argued that we could afford to raise taxes. Our unemployment rate was still above the national average, down to 6.8 percent from 10.6 percent six years earlier. We ranked forty-sixth in per capita income, but were still forty-third in per capita state and local taxes.

At the end of my address, I noted that, a few days earlier, Representative John Paul Capps, a friend and strong supporter of my program, was quoted in the press as saying that the people “were getting sick and tired of Bill Clinton giving the same old speech.” I told the legislature that I was sure many people were tired of hearing me say the same things, but that “the essence of political responsibility is being able to concentrate on what is really important for a long period of time until the problem is solved.” I said I would talk about something else “when the unemployment rate is below the national average and income above the national average in our state . . . when no company passes us by because they think we can’t carry the load in the new world economy . . . when no young person in this state ever has to leave home to find a good job.” Until then, “we’ve got to do our duty.”

I got some inspiration for giving the same old speech when Tina Turner came to Little Rock for a concert. After working through her new repertoire, Tina closed the show with her first top-ten hit,

“Proud Mary.” As soon as the band started playing it, the crowd went wild. Tina walked up to the mike, smiled, and said, “You know, I’ve been singing this song for twenty-five years. But it gets better every time I do it!”

I was hoping my old song was still effective, too, but there was evidence to support John Paul Capps’s assertion that Arkansans, including the legislators, were growing tired of my constant urgings. The legislature passed most of my specific reform proposals, but wouldn’t raise the taxes necessary to fund the more expensive initiatives in health care and education, including another large increase in teacher salaries and the expansion of early-childhood education to three-and four-year-olds. An early January poll showed that a majority of voters supported greater spending on education and that I was ahead of other prospective candidates for governor in 1990, but the poll also indicated that half the respondents wanted a new governor.

Meanwhile, some of my own first-rate people were getting tired too, and wanted to go on to other challenges, including the exuberant state chairman of the Democratic Party, Lib Carlisle, a businessman I’d talked into taking the position when it would only take, I told him, a half day a week. He later joked that I must have been referring to the time he’d have left for his own business. Fortunately, talented new people were still willing to come serve. One of the best, and most controversial, appointments I made was Dr. Joycelyn Elders to be director of the Department of Health. I told Dr. Elders I wanted to do something about teen pregnancy, which was a huge problem in Arkansas. When she advocated the establishment of school-based health clinics that, if the local school boards approved, would provide sex education and promote both abstinence and safe sex, I supported her. There were already a couple of clinics in operation, and they seemed to be popular and successful in reducing out-of-wedlock births.

Our efforts generated a firestorm of opposition from fundamentalists, who favored a “just say no”