"He's beyond Arkansas now. He's more Yale and Oxford than Arkansas." That was the snap judgment, later modified, of columnist John Brummett, the best of the journalistic Clinton watchers in Little Rock. When several people told me that Bill Clinton brought them into the state and took them on tours of its beauties, Brummett said, "I wonder what they could be. Maybe he should take me on one of those tours." When Hillary Rodham first came to Arkansas, it took Clinton nine hours to drive the one-hour's distance from Little Rock's airport to his mother's home in Hot Springs. He showed off everything from mountain lookouts (Dardanelle and Mount Nebo) to obscure purveyors of fried pies -- a local delicacy Clinton has loved not wisely but too well, as he has continued to love his often unlovable state.
In 1931, when H.L. Mencken collaborated with a statistician on three articles trying to establish the worst state in America, Mississippi won that upside-down contest, but with Arkansas and Alabama hotly contesting the bad eminence. Arkansas, near the bottom in most categories, was at the bottom for insolvency. V.O. Key Jr., in his famous study Southern Politics in State and Nation, gave the prize for fraudulent elections to Tennessee -- but Arkansas was a close second. Diane Blair, a political scientist who has written the best study of the state's constitutional structure, calls Arkansas nearly ungovernable. Yet Clinton has governed it -- fairly well -- for 12 years. He seems to find in it things that elude the rest of us. As Brummett talked, he moved from his first judgment. "Clinton in Arkansas is like Bush in the nation -- he has hometowns everywhere and a network of friends in each place." Clinton can best be understood in terms of his four hometowns: Hope, Hot Springs, Fayetteville and Little Rock.
HOPE
Clinton was born at the bottom of the state, in its black belt, which has a bleak history. Twenty-five miles to the west, the state's most famous demagogue (Jeff Davis, named for the Confederate leader) was born, in a county (Little River) where more than a hundred freed blacks were murdered after the Civil War. About 25 miles south, a cemetery from early in the century was dug up, revealing African-American bones ravaged by the worst malnutrition recorded in this country. Hope is placed on stingy soil that raises, paradoxically, only large things: thick piney woods and 200-lb. watermelons.
Actually, Hope was in the midst of a minor boom when Clinton was born there in 1946. The Federal Government established an artillery proving ground outside the town, which brought in skilled workers during the war and created new jobs. Clinton's admired Uncle Buddy, Oren Grisham, worked in the fire department on the proving grounds, which are now an industrial park.