July 30, 2008, 08:30 AM ET

Why the Wannabe Next Governor of Arkansas Hates Me

Bill Halter is the latest in a line of Rhodes-Scholars-named-Bill-turned-talented-Arkansas-Democratic-politicians (think Clinton and Fulbright). Halter tried to run for governor in 2006, got nowhere, downshifted to run for lieutenant governor that year, won, and by all accounts is biding his time until the governorship opens up again. The issue Halter has been riding from the start — it’s on the ballot this November as a result of his efforts — is his proposal for a state lottery.

Less than 50 years ago, no state owned and operated a lottery; today, 43 states do. Not surprisingly, the South was the slowest region of the country to embrace lottery gambling, but eight of the 11 Southern states now have one. The winning formula for Southern lotteries was set by Zell Miller when he ran for governor of Georgia in 1990: promise to use the proceeds of the lottery to fund college scholarships. Miller got the idea from his then-little-known campaign consultant, James Carville.

The idea spread among Democrats trying to buck the South’s rising Republican tide. In 1998 the lottery was a political winner for Jim Hodges in South Carolina and Don Siegelman in Alabama — they were the only two Democratic challengers in the country to unseat incumbent Republican governors in that election. Steve Cohen, now the congressman from Memphis, championed the idea in Tennessee, which adopted a lottery in 2002. Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina rode the lottery to reelection in 2004. And now Halter has hitched his wagon to the same star in Arkansas.

Here’s where I come into the story. Coauthor Jay Mason and I recently published a book with Louisiana State University Press called How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovation.. I was invited to give a lunchtime public lecture about the book in Little Rock by the dean of the William Jefferson Clinton School of Public Service, Skip Rutherford. The book is the farthest thing from a work of advocacy, so when an audience member asked me what I thought of Halter’s proposal, I played it down the middle, summarizing the best arguments that lottery advocates and opponents had used in other states that had considered similar proposals.

“One thing you need to realize, if you adopt a lottery,” I said as part of this summary, citing two of the least-disputed findings in the academic literature on the subject, “is that a steeply disproportionate share of lottery tickets are going to be bought by poor and working-class people and a steeply disproportionate share of the college scholarships are going to go to the sons and daughters of middle and upper-middle-class families. It’s kind of curious that it’s Democrats who promote lotteries, but it’s been one of the few winning issues they’ve had in the South.”

Little did I know the wrath I was arousing. All four Little Rock television stations were there (“That’s a first for us,” one of my hosts marveled; “even Madeleine Albright didn’t get all four”), along with some print reporters. The next day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette featured a front-page story on my talk that included the following two paragraphs:

“Halter spokesman Bud Jackson said Arkansans ‘are smart enough to trust the facts over some kooky college professor trying to turn a quick buck with a book that is several chapters short of being an honest and complete representation of reality.’

“Arkansans ‘would also be thrilled to know that the kooky professor would prefer tax hikes for all people rather than a voluntary game that would benefit tens of thousands of Arkansans with new scholarships.’”

Well, you got me, Bill Halter. Just another kooky professor trying to get rich by running the well-known scam of university press publishing.

And, yes, if state-funded college scholarships are a good idea — and I think they are — then go out and do the hard work of persuading people to fund them with their taxes. Don’t use the power and moral authority of the state to sucker poor people into losing money in weak-odds lotteries so that kids whose families can afford to send them to college can do so at a discount.

(Image incorporates map graphic from Wikimedia.org and a photo at Flickr Creative Commons)