Jim Keet

Background

Keet was born in Springfield in Green County in southwestern Missouri. He graduated in 1971 from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. He was student president for the college of business.

Keet has been in the restaurant business for more than four decades. In 1975, he joined Gerald Hamra to bring the first Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers to Arkansas. Thereafter, the company developed, owned, and operated twenty-seven Wendy's and Sisters' restaurants in Arkansas and Texas, with more than 1,200 employees. Keet is a former president of the Taziki's Mediterranean Café restaurant chain, specializing in Mediterranean cuisine, in the Heights section of Little Rock and the former president and chief executive officer of Barnhill's Buffet. He and his wife, the former Margaret Osborn (born ca. 1950), have four children.

Political activities

Keet was elected to the state House for District 58 in 1988. In 1990, he gave up his House seat to run for the United States House of Representatives to succeed Tommy F. Robinson, who instead sought the governorship, but Keet lost the congressional general election to former U.S. Representative Ray Thornton.

Keet staged a comeback when he won his Senate position in 1992 for the newly organized District 15 in Pulaski County, having defeated the Democrat John Pagan in a tough campaign.

As a legislator, Keet co-sponsored the "three-strikes-and-you're-out" violent offender law and worked to pass legislation to raise the state's literacy rate.

In 1999, Keet was boating on Lake Hamilton south of Hot Springs, when an accident occurred that took the lives of eleven persons. Keet had four years earlier co-sponsored a bill that added several new water safety rules to the Arkansas code, including the requirement that children wear life preservers on most boats. However, the provision did not apply to duck boats, the kind involved in the tragedy, which sank within thirty seconds.

Before entering the gubernatorial race, Keet had planned to seek the position in 2010 of lieutenant governor, which incumbent Democrat Bill Halter vacated to run, unsuccessfully as it developed, in the party primary against U.S. Senator Blanche Lincoln.

Prior to 2002, Keet managed the Little Rock office of then U.S. Senator Tim Hutchinson, who was unseated that year by the Democrat Mark Pryor. Keet left Arkansas in 2002 to manage a troubled business, successfully turning around the failing company, but returned to Arkansas in 2008.

Gubernatorial race

Keet promised that in his gubernatorial race, he would emphasize creative methods to improve the state's business climate, to advance literary initiatives at all grade levels, and to reform the state tax structure to foster the creation of new jobs. In his announcement of candidacy, Keet said that:

"Arkansans are sick and tired of the divisiveness and destructive rhetoric that we see on a national basis. I intend to bring a breath of fresh air to the campaign trail by discussing issues and differences of opinion constructively. I want to create a new day in Arkansas politics where everyday citizens are attracted to the political process rather than disgusted by it."

Little Rock journalist John Brummett said that Keet's "gubernatorial candidacy would bring some business and political credibility. It would be about the best the Republicans could hope to wage. By prevailing legal opinion, Republicans need a candidate who gets more than 3 percent to remain automatically qualified for the [2012] ballot. Keet would beat that by quite a bit."

A local political gonzo journalist, Jason Tolbert, in a column entitled "The Audacity of Jim Keet," asked what kind of campaign the former state senator will wage against Governor Beebe, whom Keet calls "a friend." Tolbert asked, "The question remains: What type of campaign strategy does Keet have the audacity to run? Will he play nice in a raise against a friend and save his biggest punches for Washington? Or, will he run hard at Beebe and try to take down his high approval numbers?"

Keet was dogged by questions surrounding his residency and whether, having returned to Arkansas in 2009, he met the state constitutional requirement for governor of having "been for seven years a resident" of Arkansas. Keet registered to vote in Florida in 2003 and, as a legal resident of Gulf Breeze, voted in Florida elections. Despite widespread Republican success nationally and in other Arkansas races, Keet was defeated by Beebe in the general election by a margin of 65 to 33 percent, with the remaining 2 percent for former State Representative Jim Lendall, who ran on the Green Party line. Beebe defeated Keet in all of Arkansas' seventy-five counties, making him the first Governor to do so since David Pryor's margin of 84 percent in his 1976 re-election campaign over Republican Leon Griffith.