John Brummett: The Evolution Of Jim Hendren

Editor’s note: The author of this article, John Brummett, is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The article first appeared in the latest magazine edition of Talk Business & Politics.

He said it matter-of-factly, as a simple and fateful observation, not with dread or lamentation.

Air Force fighter pilots don’t usually do dread or lamentation.

Jim Hendren, state senator from Benton County, nephew of Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former F-15 fighter pilot – and not necessarily in that order – sat in his fourth-floor office at the state Capitol a few feet from the Senate’s east gallery. He peered at the wall and said, “You’re going to David Sanders me and Duncan Baird me.”

Veteran Arkansas political observers will understand instantly the meaning of David Sanders and Duncan Baird as verbs in that context. You could use John Burris as a verb in that context as well.

As a supposedly liberal columnist for the statewide newspaper, I have, from time to time, favored Republican legislators with greatly deserved complimentary publicity, even endorsements, also known in some quarters as kisses of death.

Sanders, a former colleague in punditry, has been lauded by me for uncommon command of the private option. Baird, a former state representative now serving as Hutchinson’s budget director, has been extolled for pristine personal ethics. Burris, a former state representative and now an “adviser” and surely transitioning lobbyist, got hailed for performing more ably as a legislator than anyone I’d covered since a state senator named Mike Beebe.

None of that did those fine young men any favors among conservative constituencies.

Sanders got necessarily pushed aside by the Hutchinson administration on the private option debate because he was a lightning rod among conservatives. Baird got beat for the Republican state treasurer’s nomination. Burris got defeated when he tried to move from the state House to the state Senate.

HIS TURN
So there sat Hendren, yesterday’s hard-right conservative and today’s pragmatic one, sponsoring this time a temporary continuation of the private option form of Medicaid expansion that he had led the way in opposing only a year before. And he was observing smartly, by my questions and the apparent theme of what I was preparing to write about him, that he might be the next to come down with a case of columnist cooties.

He sensed I was getting ready to applaud his growth and maturity as a public servant. And there would go the invitation to the tea party.

Just that day, Hendren had spoken at lunch in the state Capitol basement to the so-called Conservative Caucus, a Tea Party outfit, some members of which, he said, would never be satisfied until he passed a bill saying the private option form of Medicaid expansion was evil and absurd and would be killed – not in 2017, or tomorrow, but yesterday. In his new pragmatic incarnation, Hendren was limiting his concurrence with the Conservative Caucus on the private option to “absurd” and “killed, yes, but not until 2017.”

Uncle Asa came in next to speak to the right-flank assembly in the Capitol lunchroom. “I told him I was the bad cop and he was the good cop,” Hendren said.

That’s actually not a bad strategic deployment of their personalities.

Hendren, 51, can be abrupt, cranky, candid and combative. Uncle Asa, younger brother to Hendren’s mom and 13 years older than Hendren, is ever cautious, usually gracious, seldom altogether candid and seemingly less likely than Hendren to slug you in the face.

People say that understanding Hendren is mainly about understanding the superiority complexes ingrained by training in Air Force fighter pilots.

A former Senate colleague – a friendly one – said that dealing with Hendren always puts him in mind of his college professor who once told him fighter-pilot training was a four-year program in being made to think you’re better than everyone else.

Hendren said that was wrong. F-15 training is a two-year program. And thinking you’re better than everyone else is, he explained, a mere byproduct of actually being made better than everyone else.

He was joshing. Kind of.

DEFINING PRESSURE
He said fighter pilots tend to stick together because of the shared experience. “I’ll admit fighter pilots are not known for their humility,” he said. But he argued they get a bit of a bad rap for egomania.

But then he’ll say something like the following: He doesn’t get as emotional and fatalistic about legislative issues as some of his colleagues. A looming deficit in the teacher health insurance system, which Hendren led the way in addressing last year, is not pressure, he said.

Hopping in an F-15 in Alaska and jetting out to intercept a Russian plane that is flirting with your nation’s air space without permission or announcement, and flying beside your Cold War counterpart as you and he exchange waves and perhaps other hand gestures, each of you knowing that it’s all a mere exercise in preparation for a potential nuclear incident, but that both pilots must be primed and ready for a real fight just in case . . . well, Hendren explained, making a decision to take a few thousand non-teaching and part-time personnel off the teacher health insurance plan was comparatively less stressful than that.

But coolness under legislative pressure does not necessarily mean serene in all situations. In Hendren’s case, it does not mean that at all.

Legislators still talk about the dinner attended by about a dozen of them at the Copper Grill in downtown Little Rock in 2013. A calm debate about government spending and taxation became personal and tense when Hendren, who owns and runs a 60-employee plastic products plant in Gravette and makes good money, challenged Burris, the 20-something former fast-food restaurant manager whose legislative talents and accomplishments exceed his private sector ones. Hendren told Burris the issue might come down to “whose taxes are you talking about – mine or yours?”

Burris didn’t appreciate the slight and, having a combative streak, shot back. Hendren didn’t appreciate the returned fire. The exchange became more heated. The table became awash in testosterone. It was tense. There were no fisticuffs, quite, but a ruined dinner.

One source, speaking not for attribution, analyzed the incident this way: “Burris has the ability to get under people’s skin. And Jim has the ability to have his skin gotten under.”

A BLOODY INCIDENT
Then there was the bloody incident the day in late January when Hutchinson gave his private option speech and Hendren got a little over-excited.

He was at the airport preparing to leave Little Rock when the governor’s chief of staff, Michael Lamoureux, called him and said the private option bill, which Hendren was sponsoring, needed to be filed that day.

Hendren hopped in a cab and was in such a hurry to exit the taxi in the Capitol tunnel that he conked his head on the car door. He bloodied himself so badly that the Senate nurse’s bandaging couldn’t stop the bleeding and he had to get treatment at UAMS.

Like nearly all Hutchinson and Hendren children, owing to the dominance of their lives by the Bible Church they attended (and where Uncle Asa led singing), Hendren journeyed after high school to South Carolina to attend the extremely right-wing religious school called Bob Jones University. Interracial dating was prohibited there as late as 2000.

Uncle Asa graduated from there. Hendren lasted a semester, after which he enrolled at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

He said he left because his interest was in engineering and Bob Jones was weak in that field. But he related that when fellow fighter pilot trainees complained about the strict discipline of their training, he told them they should have tried a semester at Bob Jones.

After graduating from the UA with a degree in industrial engineering, Hendren joined his dad, Kim, in co-managing the plastics operation in Gravette. The styles are different for father and son, who are both serving in the Legislature.

Kim, now 77, was an early Democratic state representative from Benton County, before the county went all-in Republican. The senior Hendren ran abysmally for the Democratic nomination for governor against Bill Clinton in 1982 and then served as a state senator from 2003 to 2011. He’s currently the state representative for District 92, which includes a portion of Benton County.

As a veteran state legislator, Kim is pretty much a backbencher given to a combination of fiery and common-sense rhetoric. He files bills to require public schools to teach kids to make change and to master cursive writing. The son is more conventional and reserved, more given to a leadership role than a backbench one.

PICTURES ON THE WALL
For whatever reason, Jim was interested that hot July day when he heard from the Air Force recruiter who had started calling him in his senior year of college. Hendren went to the recruiting office in Fayetteville. The recruiter wanted to talk about Air Force opportunities in engineering. Hendren kept looking at the pictures on the wall of the fighter pilots. “What about that?” he asked, and the recruiter replied that, well, we’ll need to put you through some tests if you’re interested in that.

“It changed who I was,” Hendren said.

Even now, Hendren is a member of the Missouri National Guard. Last year he was deployed to the Middle East for a coordinating role in an exercise he can’t talk about. Publicly, that is. Let’s say this much: He was in a supervisory job in a command center for a major offensive.

His pilot service spanned the late 1980s and early 1990s, meaning the end of the Cold War. As he put it, he was intercepting Russian pilots one year and escorting them to a Canadian air show the next.

After military service, he returned to Gravette – actually to a home a few miles away in Sulphur Springs. He took over sole management of the plastics plant, now converted from Styrofoam products to more profitable flotation devices. And he got the family-inflicted urge for politics, getting elected in 1994 to the state House of Representatives, serving until 2000.

In those days he was in a merry band of badly outnumbered conservative Republicans who got dubbed “Shiite Republicans” by their own party’s governor, Mike Huckabee. Hendren’s three terms were notable mostly for the strict anti-abortion bills he sponsored.

Hendren ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2001, and then built the plastic products business and returned to the Legislature as a senator in 2013. Immediately he became de facto leader of a hard-right contingent in the Senate that held out against the private option form of Medicaid expansion.

PLAYING QUARTERBACK
In the fiscal session of 2014, Hendren was front man for an extreme-right group from both chambers offering a compromise on the private option that wasn’t much of a compromise. It would have capped enrollment by July 2014 and ended the program by March 2015, with the cap requiring a waiver the federal government probably wouldn’t have granted.

But Hendren did manage to get himself elected Senate majority leader for this session, coinciding for dynastic purposes with Uncle Asa’s becoming governor.

“I think it was just a matter of not knowing each other yet, of not having developed that trust.”

That’s Senate President Pro Tem Jonathan Dismang’s explanation for his and others’ occasional friction with Hendren in 2013 – mostly about the private option and with its Republican architects – and a better working relationship in 2015.

Is Hendren’s conversion – or evolution, to put it more fairly or accurately or generously – a matter of being majority leader or being the nephew of a governor he wants to help succeed?

“Both, but maybe more the latter a little bit,” Dismang said.

He speculated that Hendren would have worked toward consensus as majority leader, but perhaps not actually sponsored the private option legislation for a governor other than his uncle.

Hendren said he couldn’t possibly answer that question because it would have depended entirely on the identity of that different governor and the nature of what that governor wanted or needed. Mike Beebe or Mike Ross wouldn’t have asked him for anything, he said.

A former legislator, speaking not for attribution, of course, cited simple ego. The private option of 2013 was someone else’s creation and headline-winner. Hendren likes it better when he’s playing quarterback, not sitting on the bench.

RESPONSIBILITY TO GOVERN
Here is Hendren’s explanation for his evolution: As a House Republican in the 1990s in the Huckabee days, he was in such a distinct minority – of only a dozen or so Republicans – that it was easy to espouse simple conservative principle because he had no governing responsibility. Simply spouting principle and eschewing compromise could neither accomplish nor hurt anything, he explained. But now, he said, fiscally conservative principles have delivered majority status to Republicans and handed them a responsibility to govern.

Burris, for example, has explained that, as the leader of a healthy Republican House minority in the fiscal session of 2012, he abandoned an effort to push budget cuts. He did so because, with more than 25 members, the GOP caucus had a responsibility not to get in the way of practical governance, which required a three-fourths majority vote for vital appropriations. If a simple majority had decided spending, you see, then Republicans could have clung to principle and simply accepted being outvoted.

In a genuine two-party culture, the three-fourths majority requirement for most spending raises the stakes of raw partisanship.

Indeed, the three-fourths majority, while seeming to present an invitation for obstruction, has provided, quite to the contrary, the impetus for vital concession.

Hendren said his training as an engineer and in the military taught him how to forge and accept an imperfect solution to a problem – imperfect in terms of accepting something less than your true and full principles would dictate.

“Sometimes a principle will prevent you from solving the problem,” he said.

His principle is that the federal government cannot long afford to throw billions upon billions of open-ended Medicaid expansion money at the states, and that Arkansas will not easily afford its eventual share of those expansion costs.

But his practical obligation to functioning government was not to take money abruptly from private option recipients, hospitals or the state budget. And it was to avoid a political showdown that could have imperiled the Legislature’s ability to make a budget and keep government operating.

Hendren said his constituents seem to understand that.

‘LOOKING AT ANOTHER CLIFF’
As majority leader, Hendren will take a seat (as chairman) on the task force assigned to find Medicaid savings and recommend by 2017 a more fiscally responsible long-term plan for insuring persons now on the private option.

He said the task force would look at all aspects of Medicaid, including the costs of nursing home care and mental health treatment.

“I hold out the possibility that we can find some other way to cover these people” now on the private option, he said.

But he admitted the political fight will be hard and bitter and a threat to the governing pragmatism, indeed tranquility, of the moment.

“Let’s face it: We’re looking at another cliff in 2017,” he said.

But it’s just a cliff, not a mid-air interception of a Russian plane in the waning days of the Cold War.

So far the only known injury of the private option debate has been to Hendren’s forehead, inflicted by his own adrenaline-pumped collision with a taxi door.

We have a couple of years now – well, 20 months or so – to try to avoid more widespread damage.