Truckload Authority - August/September 2018

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER | TCA 2018
Legislative Update
Can Democrats regain control
of the Senate (and House)?
By Lyndon Finney
Harken back some 40 years to 1978.
Arkansas’ upstart attorney general, a relatively unknown politician
named William Jefferson Clinton, easily won the governor’s
office, a continuation of the state’s moderate progressive political
period which began with the 1966 election of Republican Winthrop
Rockefeller.
Clinton tried to do too much during his first two years in office
and was stung by two issues that frayed the nerves of Arkansas’
generally conservative political residents despite the
fact they had traditionally voted Democratic.
First, Clinton doubled the price of car tag fees,
angering many in a state that is always near the
bottom of the income grid in the United States.
Second was the arrival of some 20,000 Cuban
refugees at Fort Chaffee just east of Fort Smith on
the Arkansas-Oklahoma border who, with the permission
of the Cuban government, left the island to
seek a new life in the U.S.
Some of the refugees who had family or sponsors
in the U.S. were quickly processed out of the fort.
Several thousand others were stuck there
for several weeks and on June 1, 1980, rioted,
burning several buildings.
The Republican gubernatorial candidate in
1980, a banker named Frank White, quickly
seized the Cubans and car tags as two of the
reasons Clinton had not done well in his first
term, and Arkansas voters agreed, electing
White by a 51.93 percent-48.07 percent margin.
Clinton reformed his political direction and in
1982 regained his office, defeating White 54.71
percent to 45.29 percent.
Ten years later, Clinton was elected president
and brought many of his Arkansas contemporaries
to Washington — much to the angst of many Capitol
insiders.
The House and Senate remained Democratic as
they had pretty much for the previous 60 years.
During the campaign, he had promised to reform
healthcare and even appointed his wife Hillary to spearhead
the effort, but his efforts failed and what’s more,
Republicans claimed Clinton was not the new Democrat he
claimed he was during the 1992 campaign, but rather a taxand-spend
liberal.
Republicans revolted and rather than campaign independently
in each district during the 1994 midterm election, GOP candidates
chose to rally behind a single program, offering in exchange for
6 Truckload Authority | www.Truckload.org TCA 2018