Arkansas still has people like Kara Alexander. Her unemployed husband Edgar robbed a bank in October to get money for food. He will enter prison on January 4, and Kara will go on welfare. She is illiterate and doesn't know how to drive. She lived most of her life in the northern hill country, where poverty means, as she put it, "liv[ing] off the land."

For Kara, political connections are not as important as money. For Kara, who will struggle with her daughter Sara, 4, on $20 in food stamps for the rest of the month, the relations between the moneyed and the unmoneyed are not so "relaxed."

On the outside, Arkansas may seem friendly and tolerant. But the color line is starkly drawn. At my high school, for example, Blacks and whites parked in different parking lots and ate lunch at different places. Even the churches in Pleasant Valley are all white.

This is not to say that any of this makes Arkansas or Little Rock so different from the rest of the nation. Nor am I saying that Little Rock is a city of undiluted racism. And, finally, I am not arguing that Bill Clinton has been a bad governor who lied about the successes of his state. Indeed, a cursory look at the pre-Clinton years reveals that Arkansasans are better off now, on the whole.

But it is true that Arkansas is more complicated than the national press has revealed. And Little Rock is no Camelot-like micro-Washington.

Still, if national political reporters are drawing the wrong conclusions about this state, Arkansasans themselves can't figure out how to deal with one of their own as a president, either.

Clinton himself is easy for us. Getting coffee at local McDonald's restaurants, working his way through down-town crowds of inner-city residents--these are the tools of retail politics that got him elected governor five times.

But all we seem to have gained from his election so far is the hope that now, people won't think we're all hillbillies. Or, as Marion Burros of The Times put it, "a bunch of racist hillbillies running around in bare feet, eating barbecue and fried catfish."

Of course, fear that this is Arkansas's image isn't so unfounded. During the campaign, George Bush didn't even know where the state is. (He placed it between Oklahoma and his "native" Texas.) One columnist from The Washington Times even wondered "whether [Bill and Hillary] use corncobs or Charmin on their Baptist bottoms."

The truth, of course, is that Arkansas is all of these things: inner-city crime, hill country poverty, a progressive and inclusive executive branch, a regressive, tired legislature. It is Bill Clinton, the Yale Law School graduate, and Kara Alexander, the illiterate mother. It is the smart young reformers who dominate politics and the book stores where Rush Limbaugh is the biggest seller.

It is these contradictions that Clinton will take with him, and it's these contradictions that help define not just this state, but the New South as a whole.

John A. Cloud '93 is the editorial chair of The Crimson, and a resident of Little Rock.