AP Images Postscript Remembering Dale Bumpers 1925-2016

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

If you’re a Democrat dreaming about your perfect presidential candidate, here’s where your fantasies might take you:

Start with a child from a small town deep in the heart of a red state. Endow him or her with unusual intelligence and a strong set of values—honesty, compassion, civic engagement—passed down from a father who was a community pillar.


Give him a good education, a stint in the military and a gift of the gab that fuses eloquence with an inexhaustible supply of down-home humor. Put him through a crushing burden—the death of his parents in a car crash—that brings him back to the small town of his birth to manage his family’s store.

Then, well into middle age, watch him mount a campaign for governor, with no money and 1 percent name recognition, against some of the most formidable politicians of his time—and watch as he vanquishes them one by one. Four years later, after reforming everything from the tax structure to the school system, he runs for the U.S. Senate against the most formidable figure in the state and—without running a single negative ad—defeats him in a landslide. Election after election, he wins despite defying popular opinion on just about every third rail he can find.

Happily, this is no fantasy, but biography. It belongs to Dale Bumpers, the Arkansas governor and U.S. senator who died at age 90 a year ago last New Year’s Day, and who—unhappily—embodies a kind of politics that may not be possible in today’s toxic environment.

Would a novelist or screenwriter dare to use as storytelling devices the elements that made up this remarkable life? The two-hour drive from Charleston, Arkansas, to the Booneville train depot in 1938 for a young boy to hear Franklin D. Roosevelt speak? The day after the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision, when the Charleston school board turned to Bumpers, the town’s only lawyer, for advice, and he told them to integrate the schools promptly? (Charleston became the only district in the entire South to do so). The record as governor, in which free textbooks were offered for the first time to high school students and medical students were offered free tuition in return for serving in the state’s rural areas? (One local political scientist rated Bumpers the only truly great Arkansas governor of the 20th century, in spite of the fact that he served only a third as long as another Arkansas governor named … Bill Clinton). The votes in the Senate against school prayer or outlawing flag-burning or banning school busing or supporting the Panama Canal Treaty? And this at the same time when many Democrats from Southern and border states were running for cover from such hot-button issues?

The explanation for Bumpers’ political survival over the course of 28 years lies in part with his character; voters who held sharply different views on all sorts of issues found in him someone they trusted, someone who not only had come from where they had come from, but also knew who they were, how they thought. And an endless collection of stories and anecdotes endeared Bumpers to voters and colleagues alike. In five statewide elections, his smallest margin of victory—in 1980, the year Clinton was losing the governorship and Reagan was winning the presidency—was 17 points.

Bumpers told one of his beloved stories just weeks after retiring from the Senate in 1998, when he returned to the Capitol to deliver the closing argument on behalf of President Clinton at his impeachment trial. In the midst of an impassioned speech that acknowledged the “indefensible” but human failing of Clinton—a politician he had once judged “manically ambitious” but had come to admire—Bumpers told this story:

“This evangelist was holding this great revival meeting, and at the close of one of his meetings he said, ‘Is there anybody in this audience who has ever known anybody who even comes close to the perfection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?’ Nothing. He repeated the challenge, and finally a itty-bitty guy the in back of the audience kind of held up his hand, and he said, ‘You—are you saying you’ve known such a person? Stand up.’ He stood up, and he said, ‘Tell us, share it with us. Who was it?’ He said, ‘My wife’s first husband.’” The Senate chamber exploded in laughter.

With this arsenal of talent, why did Bumpers never seek the presidency? The fact is, he wanted to. While he lacked the thrusting ambition of his fellow Arkansan, he had, like Clinton, harbored such dreams for a long time. He had gone to law school in Chicago because he thought it would broaden his worldview, in preparation for seeking the White House He left the governorship to challenge Senator J. William Fulbright in 1974 because he thought it was more suitable platform for a presidential run. (Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush may well have proved him wrong.) Bumpers declined to run in 1988, he said later with more than a touch of regret, because he just did not feel he had the drive for such a battle. (There were vague rumors of a private liability, but none ever came to light.)

It’s easy to see why Bumpers looks like the perfect kind of candidate for a Democratic Party desperately looking for someone to fuse the progressive soul of the party with the white working class that has abandoned it in droves. But a cautionary note is in order: The politics that Bumpers exemplified is something of an endangered species, especially in his home ground. In 2014, the last statewide Democrat in Arkansas—Mark Pryor, son of another former senator—was defeated by the deeply conservative Tom Cotton by 18 points. Indeed, the populist progressive model is all but extinct throughout the region. Outside Virginia, not a single Senate seat in the South is held by a Democrat. (Florida doesn’t really count.)

There’s one more reason a search for a contemporary Dale Bumpers is so unlikely to succeed: If

you’re looking for someone with his blend of character, temperament political courage and brainpower, they just aren’t that easy to find.