1ibai7y's Journal

We opened the primary campaign leading in the...
We opened the primary campaign leading in the polls but facing formidable oppositionAt the outset, the strongest candidate was Jim Guy Tucker, who had lost the Senate race four years earlier to David PryorSince then he had made a good deal of money in cable televisionHe appealed to the same progressive base I did, and the scars of his defeat had had two more years than mine to healI had a better organization in the rural counties than he did, but more rural voters were still mad at meThey had a third alternative in Joe Purcell, a decent, low-key man who had been attorney general and lieutenant governor and done a good job with both positionsUnlike Jim Guy and me, he had never made anybody madJoe had wanted to be governor for a long time, and though he was no longer in the best of health, he thought he could win by portraying himself as everybodys friend and less ambitious than his younger competitorsTwo other candidates also filed: state senator Kim Hendren, a conservative from northwest Arkansas, and my old nemesis, Monroe SchwarzloseRunning for governor was keeping him alive

My campaign would have collapsed in the first month if I hadnt learned the lessons of louis vuitton bag 1980 about the impact of negative television adsRight off the bat, Jim Guy Tucker put up an ad criticizing me for commuting the sentences of first-degree murderers in my first termHe highlighted the case of a man who got out and killed a friend just a few weeks after his releaseSince the voters hadnt been aware of that issue, my apology ad didnt immunize me from it, and I dropped behind Tucker in the polls

The Board of Pardons and Paroles had recommended the commutations in question for two reasonsFirst, the board and the people running the prison system felt it would be much harder to maintain order and minimize violence if the lifers knew they could never get out no matter how well they behavedSecond, a lot of the older inmates had extensive health problems that cost the state a lot of moneyIf they were released, their health costs would be covered by the Medicaid program, which was funded mostly by the federal government

The case featured in the ad was truly bizarreThe man whom I made eligible for parole was seventy-two years old and had served more than sixteen years for murderIn all that time, he had been a model prisoner with only one disciplinary mark buy a chanel bag against himHe was suffering from arteriosclerosis, and the prison doctors said he had about a year to live and probably would be completely incapacitated within six months, costing the prison budget a small fortuneHe also had a sister in southeast Arkansas who was willing to take him inAbout six weeks after he was paroled, he was drinking beer with a friend in the other mans pickup truck, with a gun rack in the backThey got into a fight and he grabbed the gun, shot the man dead, and took his Social Security checkBetween the time of his arrest and his trial for that offense, the judge released the helpless-looking old man into his sisters custodyA few days after that, he got on the back of a motorcycle driven by a thirty-year-old man and rode north, all the way up to Pottsville, a little town near Russellville, where they tried to rob the local bank by driving the motorcycle right through the front doorThe old boy was sick all right, but not in the way the prison doctors thought

Not long afterward, I was in Pine Bluff in the county clerks officeI shook hands with a woman who told me the man whod been killed in his pickup was her uncleShe was kind enough to say, I dont fake chloe bag hold you responsibleTheres no way in the wide world you could have known hed do thatMost voters werent as forgivingI promised not to commute the sentences of any more first-degree murderers and said Id require greater participation by victims in the decisions of the Board of Pardons and Paroles

And I hit back at Tucker, following my own admonition to take the first hit, then counterpunch as hard as I couldWith the help of David Watkins, a local advertising executive who was also from Hope, I ran an ad criticizing Jim Guys voting record in CongressIt was poor because he had started running for the Senate not long after he began his term in the House of Representatives, so he wasnt there to vote muchOne of the attendance ads featured two people sitting around a kitchen table, talking about how they wouldnt get paid if they showed up for work only half the timeWe traded blows like that for the rest of the campaignMeanwhile, Joe Purcell traveled around the state in a van, shaking hands and staying out of the TV-ad war

Besides the air war, we waged a vigorous ground campaignBetsey Wright ran it to perfectionShe drove people hard, and lost her temper from time to time, j12 chanel white ceramic watch but everybody knew she was brilliant, committed, and the hardest-working person in our campaignWe were so much on the same wavelength that she often knew what I was thinking, and vice versa, before we ever said a wordIt saved a lot of time

I started the campaign by traveling around the state with Hillary and Chelsea in a car driven by my friend and campaign chairman, Jimmy Red Jones, who had been state auditor for more than twenty years and who still had a good following among small-town leadersOur strategy was to win Pulaski and the other big counties, carry the south Arkansas counties where I had a leg up, hold a large majority of the black vote, and turn the eleven counties in northeast Arkansas, which had all switched their support from me to Frank White in 1980I went after those eleven counties with the same zeal Id brought to winning the rural counties of the Third District in 1974I made sure I campaigned in every little town in the region, often spending the night with new supportersThis strategy also got votes in the larger cities, where people were impressed when the pictures of me shaking hands in places candidates never visited appeared in their omega de ville men's watches newspape