The boredom of Little Rock nights can be difficult to escape, so when Rod Bryan, a record-store owner and musician of local renown, announced last July that he d be spinning records at a watering hole called the Oyster Bar, people took notice. Bryan s taste in rare soul, country, and rock roll was reason enough to come out, but that night s party also had historical significance: Having collected the ten thousand signatures required by Arkansas Secretary of State, Bryan s run for governor, long in the works, had cleared its first major hurdle: He had just become the first independent candidate to get on the ballot in over sixty years. The Oyster Bar is a social anchor of the Stift Station neighborhood, a hilly, labyrinthine district hidden on a downward slope from the main drag, where clustered one-story houses shelter the not-quite upwardly mobile.
Bryan is among this class of Little Rockers. At thirty-seven, he has worked a range of jobs that includes waiter, Six Flags security guard, grant writer, and voiceover talent. In 2001, as a knee-jerk reaction to being unemployed, he opened his own small business, Anthro-Pop Records, a new-and-used record store that during busy hours provided a camaraderie for which he s naturally suited.
Bryan is a talker, and the store was a great place to talk about the specs of the stereo equipment marooned in the corner, about the merits of each Joe Tex record in his collection, about the album that was playing when his second child was born (Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk), and about politics. Several crates of Anthro-Pop LPs had been hauled over earlier that afternoon and were now scattered across the stage. Bryan, who stands at an imposing six-foot-three, moved swiftly among them looking for the next song to cue up.
To the right of the stage leaned his bicycle, which had been modified with a small rear platform and a pair of oversized saddlebags for good measure. To collect signatures for the ballot, Bryan had ridden it for two punishing months across the state. The toll of this early stage the physical bumps and bruises as well as the strain of being away from his family had been a huge drain on his energy.
I was halfway hoping I didn t have enough signatures. The way I figured, if I kept hoping I was gonna get it and it didn t happen, I d be depressed for days. Bryan had gathered almost twelve thousand signatures in all, but, once those that had been given by unregistered voters were subtracted, the margin of certification was razor thin just fifty-two more than he needed.
From the beginning, the bike was sym bolic as well as functional, a totem not only to the values represented in Bryan s proposals (one included giving tax credits for bike purchases in order to encourage healthy living and a clean environment) but to the vigorous self-reliance he exhibited in the way he was running for governor (he wasn t just the candidate, but acted as his own treasurer and press secretary). Not total self-reliance such would be impossible for any candidate but the support Bryan sought was more moral than monetary. However important the dollars were, he was more interested in enlisting people to help stencil the signs and stamp the cardboard business cards that advertised his candidacy.
But even paint and recycled cardboard cost money, so, to give the guests a final chance to add to Bryan s coffers, Joseph Kelly, an organic farmer, shuffled up to the front of the room to conduct an auction. Gaunt and hangdog, Kelly worked the crowd as best he could to unload the goods: a modest painting by a local artist, a box of secondhand groceries, a leering plastic jack-o-lantern. Finally, he removed his gray T-shirt and, bare-chested, begged the crowd to buy it.
This elicited titters but, like most of the stash before it, little else. So the auction was a wash and Bryan lagged six million dollars behind his opponents in fundraising; so he had hardly polled and his sphere of visibility remained, with few exceptions, limited to the small strip of road where that evening s party was being held. Still, he seemed happy to have managed to get some people out and excited about his campaign, and, really, the cash was less important than the point he wanted to make about Arkansas political system and what his role might be in it.
At least he was able to remind people that he was different. Which made one wonder: If someone outside the establishment, someone with little in the way of funding and more demographically similar to the majority of Americans than most politicians, someone divorced from the good ol boy networks so common in political machines everywhere indeed, if someone like Rod Bryan were to turn conventional wisdom on its head and storm the gates But did anyone really think the gates would not hold? And what would be the effect on someone who tried to batter them with such hopeful fervor but failed?
Or perhaps a combination of fiscal and experiential poverty could be an asset. You know, Bryan said by way of comparison, when Percy Sledge was first making music, no one thought he d amount to anything. They told him, Percy, you need to fix your teeth.
Your hair s not right. You re too ugly. But then when he cut When a Man Loves a Woman, Jerry Wexler got wind of it and knew he had a hit for Atlantic.
A few days after the fundraiser, Bryan liquidated Anthro-Pop and turned the space into his campaign headquarters. He wasn t strapped for cash, no more than usual, but the store wasn t bringing a profit, and his investment in the race demanded every nickel and dime he could give it. To get a better sense of what he wanted to do in politics, I visited Bryan at home on a Saturday afternoon in late September.
His two children Vincent, who is three, and Corinne, who is five were at their grandparents house, and his wife, Lennie, attended to kitchen chores and laundry before stepping out to run some errands. She was also preparing for a fashion show at a neighborhood festival that evening, where Bryan s band, Ho-Hum, would be performing to promote their new album, the group s tenth in a decade. As we talked, he jumped up to fetch articles on his computer; he dug out pictures of Ho-Hum s recording session in England; he popped in the band s newest album and brought out his bass to practice a few lines for that night s gig.
He led me outside, where he showed me his blueberries, several types of saplings pulled up from the woods of his hometown of Bradley, a prized white rose bush that his great-grandmother Jeanne brought from Indiana circa 1920, and a small tomato patch. He pointed out how his backyard sloped upward from the house, allow-ing rainwater to drain so he could collect it. Clothes had been hung out to dry on a line.
Back inside, he sifted through paperwork from organizations and programs that were interested in granting him a speaking forum the Lions Club, Healthy Arkansas, the AFL-CIO and mentioned that he had already been out that morning on Big Dam Bridge, a newly opened extension of a nature trail that crossed the Arkansas River near downtown Little Rock. The bridge represented the type of projects Bryan wanted Arkansans to embrace, ones in which economy, education, and energy were all interlinked. Bryan s proposals were of a similarly progressive stripe, but extended across a wider range, from ambitious (his education plan worked ecological principles into the curriculum while encouraging cafeterias to serve locally grown food) to selfless (he promised to give half his salary as governor to a public cause) to microcosmic (purchasing a fleet of bikes for use on state capitol grounds).
If the scope of his philosophy and its holistic bent made it easy for voters to tag him as an unrealistic dilettante, Bryan at least wanted to prove his ideas could be put into practice. Biking was one way to live by example; another involved modifying his 1984 diesel Mercedes (to be used only when the bike was impractical) so that it ran on vegetable oil collected from local restaurants. The two-car garage behind his house was crammed with barrels of the stuff.
Wherever he drove, he said, the air smelled like turkey in a big vat. The car seemed like a smart enough move economically why pay three dollars a gallon when you can get your fuel for free? But considering the amount of time and effort required to fill the car up (it took about half an hour, and the oil had to be filtered through a hand-cranked pump), the process looked more like a sacrifice.
It was one that Bryan was willing to make as part of his small-scale war against waste. He worked a forty-hour-a-week, seven-fifty-an-hour job during the campaign to maintain his previous annual income of fourteen thousand dollars earnings that put him well below the federal poverty line for a family of four but he stressed that living frugally doesn t mean living unhappily. I think people can embrace a frugal lifestyle, he said.
It can even build a sense of community. Just things like riding a bus. I mean, my kids like to ride the bus for sport.
We ve ridden the whole circuit twice in one day. He took it as a badge of pride that his house cost just under four hundred dollars a month. He grew what food he could in his backyard.
He and Lennie kept expenses to a minimum. Bryan brought this sensibility to his political platform. When I asked him about tax cuts, he said, I wouldn t touch one tax rate until we figure out where the waste is in the system.
The answer suggested not only honest unfamiliarity with the baffling minutiae of government but also the demand he would have placed on others were he elected not to live below the poverty line, necessarily, but to scrutinize their habits in order to live more efficiently. In accepting this sacrifice, a voter was hardpressed to find what Bryan was going to give in return a tax break, more jobs, better healthcare other than his own time in office. In fact, he was running on a platform that was antithetical to what voters have come to expect in an election year.
He wanted to know what Arkansans would do for their state but Arkansans, like the majority of Americans, were more interested in what their candidates would do for them. The campaign would be an uphill battle, to say the least. Bryan is hardly the first independent candidate to have made a run for governor in Arkansas, but he is the first in a very long while to have been officially certified for the ballot.
His immediate predecessor in that regard, Walter S. McNutt who in 1940 scratched together less than half a percent of the returns is now little more than a name on the long roll of Arkansas fringe political figures. Just before the 1940 election, newspapers hardly mentioned McNutt, and barely covered the governor s race at all, for that matter.
Arkansas was a one-party state then, and the governor s race was decided when the Democratic nomination was handed down. (As one bullet from that week s Arkansas Gazette put it: GUBERNATORIAL RACE WILL BE FORMALITY.) Bryan hoped to fare better than McNutt, of course, but he also considered his circumstances similar.
For him, the one-party conditions that obtained in Southern elections in 1940 were clearly still in play. In an election year in which Democrats and Republicans were so bitterly divided, such cynicism might have seemed out of touch. Whether he was closer to the truth about Arkansas was difficult to tell, given that the race for governor was such a bland one.
Mike Beebe, the Democratic candidate, and Republican Asa Hutchinson differed slightly over a six-cent sales tax on groceries both claimed they wanted to repeal it, but Hutchinson said he would do so immedi ately. It became the main issue in the race and overshadowed those over which there was more significant disagreement, such as wheth er rural schools that failed to meet state standards should be closed. Mean while, Beebe, courting moderate voters, sounded merely like a gentler Hutchinson when talking about such issues as gay foster parentage and immigration.
Nor were the candidates particularly inspiring. Elections are grand sport in this state, and Arkansans expect their politicians to give them something to argue about. Unfortunately, Beebe and Hutchinson provided little fodder.
The rough-and-tumble drama didn t extend much beyond a minor incident in which Hutchinson s campaign manager got into a squabble with Beebe s camp over some lawn signs that had been sabotaged. The shenanigans became only slightly more personal when Hutchinson volleyed a last-minute ad in which young children derided Beebe for waffling. All told, both candidates were perceived to be totally without charisma.
It was enough to make political buffs pine for the theatrics of Orval Faubus, who, using the race-baiting tactics that were all too common in Southern politics of the Jim Crow era, likened himself to Christ when federal troops intervened during the Central High desegregation crisis of 1957; or Bill Clinton, who was always willing to employ a clever sense of pathos to tug at the voter s heart; or even current governor Mike Huckabee, a more wholesome character who lost one hundred and ten pounds in office, stayed in a triple-wide trailer while the Governor s Mansion was being renovated, and went on national television to trumpet both. For each of these politicians, personality was only raw material; to win votes, it had to be tempered by policy and posturing. Bryan wasn t interested in this for mula.
His bows toward public relations tended to parody typical electioneering he described his hometown of Bradley as being forty miles below Hope, a play on Clinton s famous slogan as well as a sly nod to the popular perception of his own chances and he refused to tune his message to what he thought different sets of voters wanted to hear. But, not surprisingly, his real aversion to politics-as-usual stemmed from the influence of lobbyists and big-business interests. We don t have politicians anymore, he often said, we have brokers.
In keeping with this belief, Bryan was opposed to a heavily funded race. I just can t understand why these candidates would spend five million dollars to win a job that pays eighty thousand, he said. Real wealth is knowing how to exploit a resource.
Take my record collection. I spent no more than six hundred dollars for my records, but they re probably worth sixty thousand. One thing I d like to achieve is to be the candidate that gets the greatest value per vote.
On November 8, he could claim at least that victory. At the time of this writing, the numbers show that Beebe s victory, won with 420,782 votes, cost $13.57 per vote; Hutchinson, meanwhile, spent $9.
96 per vote. Bryan spent only $11,071.29 during the campaign, and collected 15,796 votes: an investment of .
70 per vote. Calls for efficiency, however, don t get a name out to voters, and Bryan s lack of campaign funds put him at the mercy of media outlets to give him ex posure. Television sometimes helped: One could find him doing interviews on independent cable stations, and the NBC affiliate, KARK, included him in its series of candidate profiles.
Despite its pro-Beebe stance, the Arkansas Times featured Bryan and the Green Party candidate, Jim Lendall, in a cover story; the editorial page of the Democrat-Gazette, the state s main paper, carried pieces that were positive toward Bryan and his campaign, and even called for his inclusion in the debates. Coverage in the news section was spottier. Although there were brief B-section write-ups on his education and bike initiatives, stories often drew out the negative by including accounts of mildly scandalous incidents, such as when Bryan had a run-in with the Democratic Party head over the debates.
The real slap, however, was the inclusion of details of questionable relevance: In that particular piece, Bryan was reported as wearing shorts and sandals; Beebe was apparently dressed in a coat and tie. That kind of coverage, combined with frequent references to him as a sandwich shop worker, suggested that the paper s editors were more concerned with Bryan s quirks than his positions. The Democrat-Gazette did occasionally ask his opinion on the issues it covered, however.
Bryan s honesty could work against him, as when he said he would have to study the issue of mandatory minimum jail sentences more closely in order to comment on it. On another occasion, when asked about his position on gay marriage, he began with a rare diplomatic compromise: I m for equal rights for all human beings. The reporter asked again: Are you for or against gay marriage?
Again Bryan replied: I m for equal rights for all human beings. Bryan blinked: Are you listening to me, dipshit? To which there was no response.
Are you there? Yes, the reporter said. I ve just never been called a dipshit by someone running for governor before.
Bryan let the banter continue for a few more minutes before hanging up in disgust. Realizing the gaffe, he called back and said, Here s the deal. Marriage is for churches.
Churches do marriage. I m for civil unions, and that s where I stand. The resulting article offered readers this interpretation: Bryan said he supports civil unions, but not gay marriage, which he said should be left up to churches.
The write-up infuriated him. He was boxed into a position that made him seem pandering and that potentially alienated voters on the left. Not only could he not get the papers to cover the issues he wanted to talk about I sent my last initiative out to seventy news outlets, and not one did anything with it he also felt blunted by their interpretation of what he did get through to them.
If the media wasn t going to inform the public about his platform, Bryan would have to do it himself. By October, he d produced his first (and only) campaign ad, which he premiered at a small fundraiser held on a neighbor s lawn. A TV had been hauled out to the front porch, and the crowd of about thirty guests turned their attention away from the keg and bottles of red wine when the spot began to play.
The ad begins with shots of Bryan and his bike. As he rides through town, the camera pans to show a gas station displaying a two-fifty-seven-a-gallon price tag while a relaxed bass groove plays in the background. Images of Bryan playing with his children are accompanied by his wish that they will experience the Arkansas that I experienced as a child.
The first thirty seconds say nothing specific and follow the folksy formula that ads introducing a candidate tend to use (Beebe, for example, presented himself to viewers by saying he was born in a tar-paper shack ). Bryan s spot, while not quite so ham-fisted, similarly shows a friendly, smiling candidate who is excited about the change he would bring to Arkansas. But in the last ten seconds there is a close-up of his face.
His eyes grow wide as he cracks, If you don t vote for me, the whole world is gonna blow up into cosmic dust. The cameraman laughs, and it s difficult to tell if this is an inside joke or if the candidate simply has an odd but brave sense of humor. Standing in the middle of the lawn, Bryan was at first surprised by the ad; he had no idea the extraneous, improvised footage about cosmic dust would be used in the final cut.
But he quickly grew ecstatic. We just gotta keep that last part! he said.
The ad played several more times so the audience could figure out whether to take it seriously, or not, or both. The cosmic dust line never failed to get a laugh, but what was the risk? For as many voters as it might persuade through its dry humor, how many votes might it lose?
There would be little chance of finding out, at least on a scale that counted. At about the fifth run-through, a spokeswoman for the campaign got up and made her pitch: Now we just need the money to put it on the air The five-dollar contributions people had been slipping into the donation box were hardly enough to pay for the pizza that night, much less to buy time on television. Luke Kramer, Bryan s campaign manager, told me that he was trying to raise enough to show it during the Arkansas-Auburn football game the following weekend in Southeastern Conference territory, that s equivalent to buying time during the NFL playoffs.
Kramer guessed that each ad could run during the game at the cost of four hundred dollars; a few days later, Bryan sent out an e-mail asking for individual contributions of fifty dollars to run it just once at the cost of $2,450. The point of whether it was worthwhile to gamble on one well-placed ad turned out to be moot. Bryan s camp was unable to raise the necessary funds, so it took the $1,500 or so it got from its donation appeal and began to spend the money on cable spots targeting a variety of demographics.
It hit typical political programs like Headline News and Larry King Live, but it also went for the viewers of The Daily Show, Spike TV, and even Home Garden Television. The downside was that, while the ads cost as little as six dollars per run, they could be bumped by marketers willing to pay a higher premium. Kramer did pay that premium closer to Election Day, but, even then, there was a compromise: He could only buy thirty seconds.
Inevitably, Bryan s idiosyncratic ending was cut. As a result, he seemed like just another advocate for change. When I first met Bryan, six days after he had been certified for the ballot, the headiness of his success was obvious.
Good luck is when preparation meets opportunity, he told me a Poor Richard s formula, but snappy enough that it could have easily been the motto of his campaign. What s more, it looked as if he would get to participate in the debates an opportunity that seemed critical to his chances. Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) had issued him an invitation to its traditional candidate forum, which he accepted.
Beebe and Hutchinson did not. They instead drew up rules for their own set of two-man debates, leaving out Bryan and the Green Party s Lendall, a nurse and former state legislator whose Tolstoyan hair and beard tended to distract voters from his actual message. Bryan s disappointment turned into outright frustration as he kept trying to find a way into the debates.
The first two weren t even aired statewide, but that didn t temper his view that the television stations, the host institutions and Beebe and Hutchinson in particular were complicit in an illegal exclusionary scheme. If I could debate them I would tear them apart, he said. When I asked him how he would argue certain positions
if he were allowed to participate, he said, I wouldn t be there to talk about positions.
What I would really love to do is to tell those guys to kiss my ass on live TV. The answer might have been one of flippant anger, unrepresentative of the thinking he had actually put into his campaign. Yet it hinted at how, at the expense of other issues, his attempt to get on stage with Beebe and Hutchinson began to consume him.
In early September, at an NAACP event, Beebe approached Bryan for a handshake. Bryan remained seated and said, Man, I don t know if I can shake your hand right now. Really?
Beebe said, still grinning but shuffling away. You let me into the debates, he said, I ll shake your hand. Then added, I ll dust you too.
A video clip of the moment later made it onto YouTube and generated modest buzz around town. Such online exposure was what Bryan had intended for the campaign to begin with immediately after getting on the ballot, he began issuing one-sheet initiatives through his website. But, as his focus shifted to the debates, these stopped.
His blog remained dormant, and he was curiously elusive in cyberspace. For all those who didn t hear about Bryan through the Internet, there were others who did but who bristled at what they saw. While the YouTube clip could have been read as proof that Bryan stood outside the phoniness of conventional politicking, some, like Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley, saw the lack of diplomacy as a damaging act of hubris.
As a minor candidate, the first thing you have to do is to get people to like you, Brantley explained. But Rod got his signatures and became petulant. He wasn t gracious about the hand he was dealt.
He was so sure of his goodness and wisdom that he thought everyone would recognize that. He took everything so personally but the system works the way it works. Bryan took the trip northwest to watch the first debate in Jonesboro at Arkansas State University.
He posted signs on campus. He even managed to get a good seat. Toward the back, a couple of Bryan supporters were ejected for shouting This show is fake!
Let Rod debate! as the debate was about to begin. Bryan admired the tactic.
At every one of these functions where they wouldn t let me or Lendall in, I thought there needed to be outrage, he said and nobody was expressing outrage appropriately. But when they finally did, I thought, Wow, two people get it. They realize what s going on.
They stood up and did their thing. I was proud of them. It kind of brought a tear to my eye to see them do that.
He encouraged the same spirit for the second debate in Fayetteville. But neither he nor his supporters were allowed inside the University of Arkansas auditorium. Instead, he and Lendall watched on a big-screen in the lobby.
The third debate was held at the Clinton Presidential Center on October 17 in Little Rock. Although Bryan hadn t given up on the idea of protest, he still needed a way to get on stage. For that he would have to sue which is what he did the morning of the 17th.
Sam Hilburn, an administrative lawyer, agreed just days before the event to take the case against the University of Arkansas System and the Clinton School of Public Service, a part of the university system that shares grounds with the acclaimed Clinton Presidential Library. Precedent was against them. In 1998, Ralph Forbes, a perennial candidate for office, appeared before the Supreme Court to argue that the Arkansas Educational Television Commission (AETC) had violated his First Amendment rights in 1992 when it declined his participation in a Congressional debate.
In their six-to-three decision against Forbes, the justices drew a distinction between different types of forums in which events like debates are held. If the debate had been in an open public space, it would have been a traditional public forum and freedom of speech would have been unrestricted. If it had been conducted in a closed public space to which all candidates for Congress had been invited, it would have been a designated public forum, and only candidates would have been allowed to speak.
Forbes s case fell into a third category, however: By establishing criteria for each candidate s participation (criteria that Forbes could not possibly have met), AETC had created a nonpublic forum from which Forbes could be legally excluded. The principle behind the decision is that, in light of its potential for causing chaos, freedom of speech is not absolute. If Bryan were going to show that his First Amendment rights were in jeopardy, he would have to prove that the debate was held at a designated public forum.
It took place at the Clinton Presidential Library, which had been built with private funds and turned over to the government for upkeep. But even if the line between public and private ownership had not been so blurry and the Clinton School had been the location of the debate, there was little to distinguish the case from Forbes s. The fact that Beebe s and Hutchinson s campaigns had drawn up the rules did not fundamentally change the legal terrain.
The debate was deemed a nonpublic forum and would continue as planned. Bryan saw the ruling as a blight on the whole system. I m glad I didn t waste any money on law school, he said to a companion as he left the courtroom.
Despite his failure to get into the debate, Bryan showed up with his supporters as planned. His reception was even chillier than he d expected. KARK had promised to provide him with a monitor to watch the proceedings inside the building, but when he arrived it was no longer available.
He was redirected to the station s news truck. When he entered the building to use the bathroom, an official put his hand on Bryan s arm and told him to leave. You know, it kind of reminded me of 1954, 1957 around here, he said later.
It s a case of classism. Classism and racism are very close to each other. A fourth and final debate was scheduled for October 22 by the public television station AETN.
To no one s surprise, Beebe and Hutchinson could not be convinced to clear up their schedule conflicts. Upset as Bryan was about this, he was still eager to go up against Jim Lendall. He claimed not to be bothered by Lendall s presence in the race, but still faced the task of distinguishing himself in the minds of voters who might lump them together simply as environmentalists.
Though Bryan and Lendall both looked uncomfortable in front of AETN s cameras, they were able to establish clear differences between themselves. Lendall was emotional; Bryan was cocksure. Lendall was strong on education; Bryan was most convincing on the economy, proposing a closed-loop system in which the state s schools and businesses rely on other schools and businesses to subsist and expand, allowing Arkansas to support itself.
The idea was rooted in Bryan s intense state pride, the same that was deeply offended when Mike Huckabee carted out his backwoods charm on The Tonight Show. ( We don t need some cracker-ass minister playing up all this barefoot and pregnant crap, Bryan complained to me.) All the same, there was something weirdly reactionary about Bryan s vision of Arkansas future, about his desire to have his children experience the state he once knew.
Beebe s catchphrase may have been Believe in Arkansas, but it was Bryan who, through his proposals, carried the spirit of that motto almost to a fault. In his closing statements, Bryan made a summons to the electorate to forget whatever conventional wisdom might say about throwing a vote away on the long shot. He conjured up the image of the curtained, womb-like ballot box, with one man, one vote, and no other influence than the rumblings of the elector s mind: When you go in the voting booth on November 7, he told them, your football coach isn t in there with you, your mother isn t there with you, your preacher isn t with you in there.
The only person that s in there is you and your conscience. And I want you to think about the Arkansas of the future. It was an effective final moment, but, on the Thursday before Election Day, Bryan seemed resigned to the fact that things weren t going to play out in his favor.
Over the phone, he wearily asked me: Do you think anyone s going to vote for me? I had no good answer. Neither did he.
Early on the morning of Election Day, Bryan met up with Kramer at headquarters to do some last-minute campaigning. The former record store was now strewn with junk and such gag props as a pair of Incredible Hulk Hands. Some albums remained in bins, but the walls were cluttered, and, except for the stereo and speakers that Kramer dragged outside before Bryan arrived, the space contained little that served much function.
Bryan pulled in shortly after seven with saddlebags full of pastries and coffee for supporters Kramer had e-mailed the previous evening that there would be breakfast for those who came out for the final push. The duo pulled out two rows of theater seats from the store and began propping up signs. Kramer held one on a pole, pointing at passersby on their way to work.
A few minutes later, Bryan brought out his bullhorn and, facing the oncoming traffic, blared its siren ( I saw him shift into second gear there! ). Kramer put the bullhorn to more effective use, signaling voters and teasing the teenaged Beebe supporters who had planted themselves on the opposite corner.
Bryan s brother, even larger than he and much more laconic, pulled in for a croissant and left. A bit later, a few new supporters dropped by, and Bryan chatted with them amiably. My little boy was so cute this morning, said one woman who wore a Bryan sign around her neck, when he said he hoped everyone would vote for Rod.
He s the only one who cares about people, he said, and he s for animals After a few hours on the corner, Bryan biked down to the Little Rock train station and deposited his ballot. There were no photo ops, but he did find support from some independent voters he ran into at the polls. And then well, what else can one do after the ballot s been cast?
A leisurely lunch in the restaurant district; a ride down to the Clinton Center for some reflection; more food, this time catfish and hushpuppies courtesy of a friend; more bullhorn antics. Waiting. That evening, the morning s pastries were toted to Vino s, a pizza joint and concert venue that provided a big screen for Bryan s watch party.
The crowd was sparser than it had been at a different bar that past Saturday, when he d staged his final fundraiser with Ho-Hum and other local bands. There was a table of Bryan s family and friends, but few members of the scene s usual cohorts showed; most of those who did relegated themselves to a back-porch area away from the televisions. Results began to trickle in around eight, and there were cheers as Bryan s name went up on the screen: thirteen hundred votes.
Then the cameras cut to shots of the Beebe camp, already celebrating at the Peabody Hotel, and the Hutchinson camp, still holding out at the Doubletree. Let s go downtown to the Peabody, Bryan encouraged. Wouldn t it be great to drive a Yukon right through the wall of that place?
As long as you use vegetable oil, a supporter quipped. Only a few calls came in on his cellphone. One was from Bryan s mother, encouraging him to behave.
Another was from a reporter asking if he had anything to say about the other candidates. Bryan was polite to his mother; for the reporter, he had only a comment on the grocery tax: I just can t wait for next year s Super Bowl when I won t have to pay any tax on my bratwurst. Bryan s vote total crept up to thirty-three hundred by 9:30 p.
m., and an hour later, he had almost seven thousand. But the essential number was the percentage, and it was stuck at two.
By eleven the crowd had dispersed except for a few hangers-on; the soundman had long since started mixing the chatter of the political analysts with New Order. As the bar closed and the place cleared out, Lennie talked with Kramer outside. I hope to see you, Luke; you know, we live just four blocks down, and the kids get along so well, and oh, hell The group of six or seven was trying to figure out what to say and which bar to go to next, and the candidate, a bit glassy-eyed for having dulled the Election Night pain, emerged from the building.
He repeated a question he d been asking all week: What do you think? Am I going to get more than two percent? No, his friend said, you re not.
It was the most direct answer Bryan had gotten all night.
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