Mike Beebe won't dispute the notion that his first 15 months as governor have been an extended honeymoon. But he says like a typical marriage, it requires work.
In his first legislative session, he managed to persuade lawmakers to support his efforts to halve the state's grocery tax and help the state end a long-running school funding lawsuit. He managed to stave off any efforts to funnel the state's bulging surplus for lawmakers' pet projects.
For an encore, last week he rushed through the Legislature a hike in the state's severance tax on natural gas raising a rate that hasn't been touched in more than 50 years and finding a way to give some extra cash to the state's struggling roads.
The governor said he's sure he'll have some struggles down the road, but dismissed the suggestion that he's had an easy time since his 2006 election.
"Things aren't as easy as they appear. There's a lot of work that goes into the final product and there were several times this time that it looked pretty bleak," Beebe said.
When asked whether he'd disagree with the honeymoon description, though, Beebe demurred.
"The people have been very good to me and the Legislature has been good to me, and I've enjoyed that honeymoon," Beebe said. "I wouldn't dispute it at all. I don't take it for granted, though."
He better not, because the good times can't last forever.
Beebe, a 20-year veteran of the Senate who served as attorney general for four years, can claim plenty of credit for the success he's found in his first two legislative sessions as governor. But timing and luck can share in that credit.
Timing helped Beebe, who followed Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee's sometimes rocky relationship with the Democratically controlled Legislature. Huckabee's victories in his first year creation of an insurance program for poor children, passage of the state's first major tax cut and a new computerized car-tag renewal system were overshadowed by his public spats with Democratic lawmakers.
Luck also came to Beebe's aid, with a surplus approaching $1 billion providing a cushion for the state as he began his first legislative session. It's debatable whether the state would have been able to pull out of the long-running Lake View school funding case without some of those funds to pay for facilities improvements.
The biggest question Beebe now faces is whether his skills will fill in the gaps that timing and luck did before. As time passes, it'll be harder for Beebe to perk up lawmakers by being the pleasant alternative to the sometimes prickly Huckabee.
And luck probably won't be on his side, either. At least, it won't come in the form of a record surplus to help Beebe push through more of his agenda. Though the state's revenues are coming in above forecast, the state's fiscal office has warned of Arkansas feeling the pinch of the national economy's slowdown.
That may be where Beebe's greatest fight comes. The governor is now turning his eye toward 2009 and completing the rest of the promise he made to eliminate the state's sales tax on groceries.
Beebe has said he won't consider any other tax reductions until that sales tax is addressed and says he'll even look at cutting some state services to help reduce the tax further. The only things he won't cut, he says, are education, human services or law enforcement.
The severance tax fight may not be over, either. Though incoming Senate President Bob Johnson bit his tongue when the tax hike came to the Senate chamber, he may not keep quiet for long.
An outspoken opponent of the increase, Johnson told reporters last week that he believes the increase will be revisited in future sessions, though he said he won't be the one to bring it up.
"I don't think I'll have to. I think at the end of the day, we will rue the day that we went in the wrong direction," said Johnson, D-Bigelow.
Beebe says he doesn't think it's a fight he'll have to worry about. With well over 3/4 of the Legislature on his side, Beebe believes there's enough support to keep the tax in place.
Johnson, however, has shown he doesn't mind picking fights. The senator became the face of the long-standing practice of using the state's General Improvement Fund to pay for lawmakers' pet projects a practice that went by the wayside during last year's session.
Beebe, however, says he doesn't know whether the next few years will continue to be as good to him.
"I never speculate. I'm sure we'll have lots of bumps," Beebe said.
(DeMillo covers Arkansas politics and government for The Associated Press.)
