LITTLE ROCK — Some people of the left-of-center persuasion were sitting around the other day indulging in light libation.
They were saying the Arkansas Democratic Party ought to put out a television commercial saying, “Hey, we don’t like him either.”
President Barack Obama, that is.
It was black comedy or gallows humor.
I mean, my goodness, you have a perfectly fine U.S. president polling at 31 percent in what, just a few years ago, was a Democratic state.
Republicans, never able to build a party in Arkansas on their own, appear ready to sweep into power next week by simply not being in the same party as Obama.
This sums it up: There is a billboard in rural northeast Arkansas blaring these words: “Save America. Vote Republican. Every Democrat elected helps Obama.”
Take a bona fide Bubba Democrat like state Sen. David Wyatt of Batesville, tucked there in northeast Arkansas.
Maybe he’s tooling down the highway in his pickup and all of a sudden he looks up unsuspectingly at a billboard that lathers Barack Obama, for whom he hasn’t any use, all over him.
So the state’s Democratic Party leaders have been fumbling around trying to design a countering message. They have been seeking to fashion a narrative that might save a decisive few of their perfectly fine right-of-center local Democratic legislators from a lethal association with Obama.
It has not been easy.
Seriously, they dare not disassociate themselves entirely or directly from their own president. The Democratic base remains vital. The party can’t offend it or sell it out.
So they thought for a while that they would run their popular centrist governor, Mike Beebe, against the evil Koch brothers. They are the billionaire multinational industrialists who are pouring money into the state to buy the Legislature and advance their semi-anarchic agenda of low taxes, low regulation, bare-bones government and abandoned public education.
But it turns out that Arkansas voters don’t transfer their affections that way. If they did, Bill Clinton’s bravura nomination speech for Obama would have helped the latter.
And it turns out that white rural conservatives in Arkansas don’t care about some billionaires they don’t know and who have a name they aren’t sure how to pronounce. It’s “Coke,” by the way.
Now, with a week to go, the state’s Democrats have come up with a tactic and message.
It is to go into selected target areas, meaning white and rural where the prevailing values are very conservative. Thus the message is not generally heard in areas where liberal Democrats might not much appreciate it.
It is to present the message not via television, but with more narrowly directed media: local radio.
And it is simply to say that your local Democratic legislator—Sen. David Wyatt of Batesville, for example—is no Washington Democrat, but an Arkansas Democrat.
“If there’s one thing that Arkansas voters know, it’s that Arkansas Democrats are not Washington Democrats,” a woman’s voice says.
Then the spot inserts the name of the relevant local Democratic legislator to say that he, or she, has worked with Beebe to balance the budget, pass the largest set of tax cuts in the state’s history and create 27,000 jobs.
Then it says that Beebe and Arkansas Democrats have a “proven track record,” unlike “out-of-state special interests” trying to influence our election.
That’s the Koch brothers, without saying so.
Then it says voters are looking for Democrats “who value our faith, balance our budget, cut our taxes and create real jobs for real people.”
The faith reference has to do with Republican efforts to smear Arkansas Democrats as heathens because the Democratic National Convention got into a dust-up over whether to refer to God in its platform.
The commercial concludes: “Washington politicians of both parties [that way you don’t blame national Democrats for polarization and dysfunction] can learn a lot from our leaders here in Arkansas.”
So there you have it. That is the closest the state Democratic Party can come to telling white rural conservative voters of the state that it doesn’t like Obama either.
It remains to be seen whether that will be close enough.
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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.