Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a State

Conclusion

Pollard and everyone else in Arkansas would get more publicity than they had ever bargained for. Once the national press became convinced that the governor of Arkansas might actually be a legitimate candidate, Arkansas, and especially Little Rock, found itself in the middle of a publicity storm that seemed to have blown in from another galaxy. For many journalists with little exposure to the South or to fly-over country in general , Arkansas possessed a certain exoticism, a land of dirt roads, big hairdos , and people who referred to the man who would be president as “Bill” not out of some exaggerated egalitarian sensibility but because they really knew William Jefferson Clinton, or had at least met him once. “Arkansas is a funny, even captivating place,” wrote James M. Perry of the Wall Street Journal, “It is quirky and independent, and stubborn. It is full of contradictions .”54 Suddenly real journalists, not just travel writers, found themselves documenting the by now familiar signposts of the colorful South: hounds and plastic razorback hats, catfish fries and duck hunts, pickup trucks and corner café gossip. Just how central such things were to Clinton’s background or to Arkansas’s essence remained undetermined, but they served as reminders to reporters that they weren’t in Manhattan anymore. Quirky Arkansiana could lend the Clinton campaign and presidency a valuable folksy, populistic aura, but reporters’ other “discoveries”—such as Arkansas’s perennial jostling with Mississippi for forty-ninth place in the rankings for a variety of indicators of economic and educational attainment—provided ammunition for Clinton’s opponents and for commentators less inclined to find Linda Bloodworth Thomason’s genteel eccentricity in the Land of Opportunity. While former president Richard Nixon pulled no punches in criticizing the Arkansas governor as “Dogpatch,” Bill Clinton’s candidacy and early presidency proved a conundrum for many a journalist and Republican speechwriter. Left-of-center reporters from New York, Washington, and Los Angeles struggled to reconcile inherited cultural preconceptions and stereotypes of Arkansas with the articulate and media-savvy Rhodes Scholar–Yale Law graduate thrust suddenly before them. Ordinarily paragons of political correctness, many nonetheless found a target like Arkansas too inviting to pass up, the popular stereotypes of Arkansawyers in particular and white southerners in general too familiar to be incorrect, too accurate to be offensive. The power of the Arkansaw image produced head-scratching, unintentionally patronizing toss-offs. “As a child, Bill Clinton was gored by a boar in the Arkansas bush because he was ‘too fat and slow’ to get away. He’s been running ever since,” commented a writer for Newsweek. Time’s Margaret Carlson identified Clinton as “one of the first from [Hope] to go to college”—in spite of the fact that his family had moved to Hot Springs when he was small—and dipped into the Arkansaw 178 ✧ ALL ROADS LEAD TO BUBBA BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 178 image inkwell when describing Clinton’s defeat for gubernatorial reelection in 1980. “In Pea Ridge and the Ozarks, the voters resented the notion that this whiz kid had returned home to put shoes on everybody and introduce them to book learning.”55 In New York City, where provincialism is leavened with a convenient dollop of myopia, Clinton’s Arkansas origins provided the starting point for a variety of putdowns. Talk radio host Don Imus dismissed the candidate as a “redneck bozo.” Protesters welcomed the Arkansas governor with “Bubba Stinks” signs. Following a Clinton speech on the topic of blackJewish relations, one incredulous audience member cracked, “‘What does this bubba know from bar mitzvahs?’” By the time the Clintons pulled the jalopy into the White House drive, the Big Apple had developed its own little Bubba cottage industry to denigrate, and occasionally honor, Clinton. In early 1993 the publishers of the Quayle Quarterly, a magazine devoted to mocking Vice President Dan Quayle, announced that they were “celebrating the first Bubba president” with a new quarterly entitled simply Bubba. And a northeastern admirer (one would assume) of the Arkansas governor named a racehorse Bubba Clinton. Taking a page from the Arkansas manual ALL ROADS LEAD TO BUBBA ✧ 179 Ma and Pa salt and pepper shakers, just two of the hundreds of hillbilly and Arkansaw curios available in generations of gift shops. BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 179 of good-natured self-deprecation, Clinton...