DATE: Saturday, November 8, 1997            TAG: 9711080011

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B6   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   42 lines

CHECK TO CLINTON FOUND IN TRUNK ANOTHER ARKANSAS TALE

Arkansas residents must have been elated in 1992 when their Rhodes scholar native son was elected president of the most powerful nation on Earth. At last the world would see the real Arkansas, the progressive Arkansas, instead of the L'il Abner stereotype.

You win some, you lose some.

The Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers stories are hardly worth retelling, but their tawdry tales and the accompanying trailer-park jokes presumably are not what civic boosters had in mind.

Neither are tales of cronyism, banks treated like candy stores and land-development deals that look like criminal conspiracies designed to lose money.

The state can boast that it has a very high-quality inmate population - a banker, a judge, a governor and a partner in a prestigious but overbilling law firm have all headed for the pokey.

And the state's backwater image has been banished. It turns out that Arkansas is a surprisingly cosmopolitan place, teeming with shady Indonesians, Chinese and Central Americans.

And now the nation has seen how business papers are stored in Arkansas.

A financial institution asks an employee to deliver them to a warehouse. The employee places the papers in the trunk of his car and drops it off to be repaired. In a subsequent dispute with the mechanic over a bill, the employee leaves the car at the shop forever and forgets about the documents.

They remain in the trunk for nine years, till the car is damaged by a tornado and someone looks in the trunk.

One item discovered there is a cashier's check for more than $20,000 payable to Bill Clinton, but unsigned.

Millions of tax dollars will be spent investigating the check. Meanwhile, the story gets spread around the nation, which has a good laugh at Arkansas' expense.

In the present age of independent investigators, when any association with a president is dangerous to one's reputation, a state might think twice before putting forward a native son to lead the nation.

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