Jim Holt On Jim Holt

ENTRY WOULD MUDDY SENATE RACE

Jim Holt told me to write that there’s no formal announcement yet but that he’s sure talking like a candidate.

I wouldn’t normally let him, or anyone else, dictate my lead paragraph. But he summed it right well.

It appears he has a plan.

He was telling me that if everyone in the 44 percent who voted for him as the underfunded and unappreciated Republican nominee against Blanche Lincoln in the U.S.

Senate race of 2004 would send him $5, he’d have more than $2 million right there.

He was telling me that modern technology opens all kinds of new ways to raise money and organize a campaign for the same office against the same person next year.

He was telling me that he’d seen a poll that suggested more voting strength right now in the TEA Party movement than in the Republican Partyitself. They’re singing his song, Holt said.

“Taxed enough already - that’s what my political record is all about,” he said.

When I mentioned his old Senate colleague Gilbert Baker of Conway, who has raised more than a half-million dollars and would be Holt’s main obstacle to the Republican nomination, Holt said, “Talk is easy, but you judge by the record.”

My goodness. Is Baker vulnerable to portrayal as a taxer-and-spender?

He voted for an agreedon natural gas severance tax increase. He was co-chairman of the Joint Budget Committee that produced a budget that Holt conceivably could argue was not as lean as it ought to be.

Baker went establishment somewhere along the way.

That’s the short of it. Holt is not establishment. He is extreme. That’s the short of that.

Holt once tried to rewrite science textbooks to his own religious specifications. He champions harsh policies toward illegal immigrants.

He went to Iowa on libertarian Ron Paul’s dime to talk critically of Mike Huckabee when Huckabee was in the process of winning the Republican presidential caucuses.

Baker was in Iowa campaigning for Huckabee at the time. There’s something Holt might use in a Republican primary - Baker’s supportive association with one of the taxingest and spendingest governors in the state’s history, by whom I mean, yes, Huckabee.

Surely you remember that Huckabee once famously said, regarding immigration, that he and Holt’s type were “not drinking the same Jesus juice.”

Holt repeated a phrase conspicuously three times in our brief telephone conversation: “Economichealth care reform - that’s what we need.”

I do believe he is working on a slogan, a mantra, a message, a theme. It’s one by which he could assail Democratic efforts for health care reform as inconsequential at best, disastrous at worst and a misplaced priority demonstrating insensitivity to the underlying economic plight of hard-working Arkansawyers just trying to make ends meet.

Holt is a self-employed, many-childrened religious zealot of impractical conservatism who has two assets none of the announced seven Republican senatorial candidates has.

One is a fervent base of supporters. The other is a history of running against Lincoln and getting nearly four-and-a-half votes in 10 statewide.

That grows all the more remarkable and alarming the more you think about it.

His entry into the race, assuming it formally occurs, will really muddy the water. JOHN BRUMMETT IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE ARKANSAS NEWS BUREAU IN LITTLE ROCK.

Opinion, Pages 11 on 12/27/2009

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