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Eclectic maze named Kim [Hendren]
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Candidate
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| Contributor | DFWDem |
| Last Edited | DFWDem Apr 21, 2009 09:40am |
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| Category | General |
| News Date | Tuesday, April 21, 2009 03:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | By John Brummett
Kim Hendren, the newly announced Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, was a Democratic state senator from Benton County from 1979 to 1983. That makes him odd already.
For full and fair context, he was a blustery conservative Democrat and this was shortly before the wholesale Republicanization of the county and much of the immediate region.
Hendren actually ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1982, if you could call that running. Bill Clinton got a lot of votes in the primary. So did Joe Purcell and Jim Guy Tucker. Hendren got 3.8 percent, which kept him out of last place by besting Monroe Schwarzlose.
Along the way Hendren had married the sister of a couple of conservative young men also from the Gravette area in rural Benton County. Those would be the Hutchinsons, Asa and Tim, who would emerge in the mid-1980s as the hope of a new Republican generation in Arkansas.
When Hendren came back into state legislative politics nearly 20 years later, he was a Republican. It was a seamless transition. The book hadn’t so much changed as the cover.
You could say he became something of a tax-and-spend and nanny-state Republican.
Hendren is 71 and folksy and can come across as a tad grouchy and gruff and temperamental. I’m dubious he’ll be the GOP nominee and even more dubious he could get to the Senate if he emerged from the primary. |
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