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Clinton launched ambitious plans for the environment and schools, relying on some experts brought down from the university or from out of state. Three of these visible aides wore beards -- an even greater offense than Hillary's retention of her original last name. Clinton was rejected after his first term for the second Republican of the century, Frank White, who was very far from Rockefeller Republicanism.
Like Michael Dukakis, who was defeated by an ex-footballer after his first term as Governor of Massachusetts, Clinton set about recasting his political persona. But where Dukakis was given a light cosmetic coating, Clinton returned to his most authentic self -- the gregarious schmoozer and good ole boy. Arkansas had the least-developed single-party system of all those states studied by V.O. Key Jr. It lacked even factions within the one party. Personality alone formed shifting clots of political alliance.
No one is better than Clinton at this kind of shoulder-patting, chat-about- the-family, how-is-so-and-so-back-in-such-and-such-a-town politics. In his second and subsequent terms as Governor, he sought out legislators in the halls of the capitol, acting as his own best lobbyist. Brummett wrote that it would be more dignified for the Governor to summon people to his office; but the informality of Clinton's new approach seemed to work. He realized that his long-range plans depended on building popular support, and he sent his wife out to talk about concern for education in every county of the state. The remade Hillary -- higher-class in her clothes, lower-class in her rhetoric, and now called by her married name -- was accepted as no longer an outsider, and Clinton's education reforms (testing of teachers, standard curriculums, aid to marginal students, vocational training) are the principal success of his 12 years in office.
To accomplish this, Clinton had to rely on regressive sales taxes rather than expend further energy trying to work an income tax through the constitutional baffles. He had to cut corners and improvise in ways that less hamstrung governments avoid. "Clinton is criticized for using corporate jets to get around the state, but every politician does that here," says Diane Blair. "Otherwise you don't go anywhere. I have seen Hillary fly through black storms to get to a high school graduation where they are waiting for her. She would never make it if some firm in the town did not fly her."
Clinton has instilled a new sense of pride in many citizens of his state. Ms. Rodham was shocked when she arrived at the University of Arkansas Law School and had a student complain of her demands: "What do you expect of me? I'm only from Arkansas." She did not realize that he might have been guying this traveler into Arkansas, in the defensive old form of mockery; but even this hangdog defiance of the outer world masked an uneasiness about the state's reputation. Journalists covering Clinton in Little Rock are constantly asked by a suspicious citizenry, "What have you heard about us up there?" % The state took a long time to recover after it sent its prized leader Jeff Davis to the U.S. Senate in 1907, only to have him laughed into fecklessness by a more sophisticated audience. The state has tried to send more presentable leaders to Washington ever since -- men like Fulbright, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor.