had already won a Grammy award for his songwriting. I joined him on sax for “Summertime,” the first time we’d played together since 1964. The inauguration was a big event. Hundreds of people from all over the state came, as did friends Hillary and I had made over the years, including my old roommate Tommy Caplan; Dave Matter, who managed my losing campaign at Georgetown; Betsey Wright; my pro–civil rights Boys Nation buddies from Louisiana, Fred Kammer and Alston Johnson; and three friends from Yale, Carolyn Ellis, Greg Craig, and Steve Cohen. Carolyn Yeldell Staley also came home from Indiana to sing. I worked hard on my inaugural address. I wanted both to capture the historical moment and to tell my fellow Arkansans more about the values and ideals I was bringing to the governor’s office. The night before, Steve Cohen had given me an idea I added to the speech when he’d said he was feeling two things he hadn’t in a long time, “pride and hope.” I said some things in that speech that I believe as strongly today as I did then, words that capture what I’ve tried to do in all my public work, including the presidency:
For as long as I can remember, I have believed passionately in the cause of equal opportunity, and I will do what I can to advance it.
For as long as I can remember, I have deplored the arbitrary and abusive exercise of power by those in authority, and I will do what I can to prevent it.
For as long as I can remember, I have rued the waste and lack of order and discipline that are too often in evidence in governmental affairs, and I will do what I can to diminish them. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the land, air, and water of Arkansas, and I will do what I can to protect them.
For as long as I can remember, I have wished to ease the burdens of life for those who, through no fault of their own, are old or weak or needy, and I will try to help them.
For as long as I can remember, I have been saddened by the sight of so many of our independent, industrious people working too hard for too little because of inadequate economic opportunities, and I will do what I can to enhance them….
The next day I went to work for what would prove to be two of the most exhilarating and exhausting, rewarding and frustrating years of my life. I was always in a hurry to get things done, and this time my reach often exceeded my grasp. I think a fair summary of my first gubernatorial term is that it was a policy success and a political disaster.
In the legislative session I had two major spending priorities, education and highways, and a host of other substantive reforms in health, energy, and economic development. In 1978, Arkansas ranked last among all states in per capita education spending. A study of our schools conducted by Dr. Kern Alexander, a nationally recognized expert in education policy from the University of Florida, concluded that our system was dismal: “From an educational standpoint, the average child in Arkansas would be much better off attending the public schools of almost any other state in the country.” We had 369
school districts, many too small to offer needed courses in math and science. There were no state standards or evaluation systems. And teacher pay was pitifully low in most places. The legislature passed almost all my education proposals, prodded by the Arkansas Education Association, which represented most of the teachers; the associations representing the administrators and school board members; and pro-education legislators, including Clarence Bell, the powerful chairman of the Senate Education Committee. They approved a 40 percent increase in funding over the next two years, including a $1,200 teacher pay raise in each year; a 67 percent increase for special education; increases for textbook costs, transportation, and other operations; and, for the first time, aid to school districts for programs for gifted and talented children and for transporting kindergarten students, a big step toward universal kindergarten.
The money was tied to efforts to raise standards and improve quality, something I always tried to do. We passed the first state programs mandating testing to measure pupil performance and indicate areas that needed improvement, a requirement that all teachers take the National Teacher Examination before they could be certified, and a bill prohibiting the firing of teachers for “arbitrary, capricious, or discriminatory” reasons. We also established the Arkansas Governor’s School for gifted and talented students, which met for the first time at Hendrix College in the summer of 1980. Hillary and I spoke to the first class. It was one of my proudest achievements, and it’s still going strong. In two other areas I was less successful. The Alexander report recommended reducing the number of school districts to two hundred, which would have saved a lot of money on administrative costs. But I couldn’t even pass a bill to create a commission to study it, because so many small towns believed that if they didn’t have their own districts, “city folks” would close their schools and destroy their communities. The other area in which I met resistance involved the formula by which school aid was distributed. Several school districts had filed a suit contending that our system was unfair, and that, when coupled with differences in local property-tax revenues, the inequalities in spending per child across the state were so great they were unconstitutional. The formula didn’t take adequate account of differences in property values or student population shifts, and it gave more money per student to the very small districts, where the overhead costs per student were much higher. This system was hard to change, because giving more to some districts meant giving less to others. Both groups were well represented in the legislature, and when the losers saw the printouts showing what the changes would do to their districts, they fought hard to stop them. We adjusted the formula, but not by much. It would take a 1983 state supreme court decision invalidating the school formulas before we could really change things. The highway program I proposed was designed to deal with the deterioration of our state highways, county roads, and city streets, and the need for new construction. Arkansas hadn’t had a good road program in more than a decade, and potholes and slow travel were costing people time and money. There was a lot of support for a road program, but there were big disagreements about how to fund it. I proposed a hefty tax package featuring large increases for heavy trucks, which did most of the damage, and substantial ones for cars. At the time, car tags, like truck licenses, were priced according to vehicle weight. I thought this was unfair, since the weight differences for cars, unlike trucks, were not significant in terms of road damage, and the heavier cars were older and usually belonged to people with lower incomes. Instead, I proposed to set fees for car tags based on the value of the car, with the owners of the most expensive new ones paying $50 and of the oldest, least valuable paying $20. Under my proposal, the owners of old, heavy cars would not have had to pay more. Some of the seasoned legislators said we shouldn’t raise the license fees at all, and instead should finance the road program with an increase in fuel taxes. Organized labor was against that because ordinary drivers would have to pay substantially more over the course of a year, though they wouldn’t feel it since the tax would be buried in the price of fuel purchases. I agreed with labor on the merits, but a gas-tax increase would have been far less politically damaging than what I did. None of the organized groups except the highway contractors supported my proposal. The trucking, poultry, and timber interests said they couldn’t afford the increases on their big trucks, and they got them reduced. The new-car dealers said I wanted to charge their customers too much, and licensing based on value would be an administrative nightmare. I thought their arguments were particularly weak, but the legislature bought them. The highway lobby was represented in the Senate by Knox Nelson, a wily legislator and road contractor himself, who wanted the money but didn’t really care how it was raised. In the end, the legislature approved a large increase in revenue from car tags but within the old weight structure, nearly doubling the price for heavy cars from $19 to $36. I had a decision to make. I could sign the bill into law and have a good road program paid for in an unfair way, or veto it and have no road program at all. I signed the bill. It was the single dumbest mistake I ever made in politics until 1994, when I agreed to ask for a special prosecutor in the Whitewater case when there was not a shred of evidence to justify one.
In Arkansas, people’s car license fees come due every year on their birthdays, when they have to go to the revenue offices in their local counties to renew them. After the increase went into effect on July 1, every single day, for a whole year, a new group of people would come into their revenue offices to find their birthday present from me: the price of their car tags had doubled. Many of them were country people who had driven more than twenty miles to the county seat to buy their new tags. Often they had no checkbooks and had brought only enough cash to pay the previous cost of the tags, so they had to drive all the way back home, get more cash out of the family stash, and come back. When they got back and had to wait in line, as they often did, the only thing they had to look at in the spartan revenue offices was a picture of the governor smiling down on them.
In late 1978, when I was first elected governor, Hilary Jones had made a prophetic comment to me. He said the hill people had carried me through three elections, but I would have to get my votes in the cities now. When I asked him why, he replied that I was going to work on schools and economic development, which the state needed, but that anything I did to raise school standards would threaten the rural schools; that I’d never be able to get
