Can anyone remember a time Arkansas and Indiana elected DECENT people to statewide office?
With Govs. Mike Pence (IN) and Asa Hutchinson (AR) signing "right to discriminate" bills in the name of "religious freedom", it's pretty hard to realize that their states actually elected good people to statewide offices instead of these Religious Right followers.
Arkansas once had William Fulbright as senator. He often challenged US intervention abroad. Once a segregationist Dixiecrat, he voted for a civil rights bill for the first time in 1970. Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, a moderate Republican, expanded primary and adult education and integrated public schools. He also reformed the state prisons.
And who can forget Bill Clinton, who rose from state governor to US president? I know he had his problems with his personal life and sold out American workers with NAFTA. But if Clinton and Hutchinson competed in an election I'd vote for Clinton.
Indiana - Sen. Birch Bayh drafted what would be the 26th Amendment, granting the vote to 18-year-olds. He also supported the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX! His son Evan was also a decent senator (despite supporting the Iraq War and being part of the DLC).
Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican, at least came to oppose US sanctions against Cuba. He was so sane about it that he managed to get primaried out of re-election in 2012 (but because Richard Mourdock pulled a Todd Akin, Democrat Joe Donnelly now has Lugar's seat). Lugar also told the NRA and gun lobbyists to go pound sand, too. Otis Bowen, a Republican governor of the state in the '70s, "vetoed legislation that would have restricted the right of a woman to seek an abortion" and as HHS secretary in Reagan's 2nd term "champion(ed) the cause of securing more funding for AIDS".
Nowadays, it seems that being a complete partisan regressive is a prerequisite to winning statewide office in those states. Look who's representing those states in US Senate and governorships. Tom Cotton. John Boozman. Dan Coats (whose seat rotated between him and E. Bayh twice since '89, after B. Bayh retired). Hutchinson. Pence. They can't hold a candle to their predecessors listed beforehand. (OK, I know Joe Donnelly's a Democrat, but has he really done much good so far?)
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Shit, can't say I miss him much either.
He had that Senate seat until the day he died or until he didn't want it any more, whichever came first. But the Republicans did him in, because he only voted with them 97% of the time, and that's just not good enough.
They ran Richard "Rape is something God intended to happen" Mourdock, and there was just enough sanity in the voting public for us to slip in Joe Donnelly.
Now, Donnelly is the kind of Democrat that can win in Indiana, which is to say, horrible. He's very nearly a Republican. But he votes with/for us some of the time, and Mourdock would have voted with/for us none of the time, so I guess from a pragmatic standpoint he's better than nothing.
But just.
http://gawker.com/5950211/arkansas-gop-candidate-endorses-death-penalty-to-discipline-rebellious-children
