U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton stands typically alone in the Arkansas congressional delegation in having voted for anti-government forces on Wall Street and against the interests of the state’s abundant farmers and poor people.

Young Tom was elected more by and for big-business economic conservatives calling themselves the Club for Growth, who sent him fat packets of checks for his congressional campaign last year, than by and for the pawns otherwise known as back-home constituents.

He and national Republicans cynically calculate-alas, reasonably-that Arkansas voters so irrationally resist Obamacare that they’ll promote Cotton to the U.S. Senate next year.

Naturally, Mark Pryor, the two term Democratic U.S. senator whom Cotton seeks to replace, is working hard to cement his opponent’s fully deserved isolation in this anti-farmer posture.

It wouldn’t seem all that difficult considering that Cotton’s position-that food stamps ought to be taken out of the farm bill and cut by $40 billion, and that the farm bill shouldn’t be passed unless separated-is so marginalized as to be conspicuous even in an otherwise decidedly conservative Republican delegation.

It’s a position Cotton firmed up several days ago with a congressional mailer.

U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford,the Republican not without Tea Party connections who represents the farmers and poor people of eastern Arkansas, voted for the farm bill with the usual food-stamp appropriation. Crawford told the local Capitol View news program on KARK-TV that it was time-honored and logical to put food stamps and farm policy together to blend urban and rural interests.

U.S. Sen. John Boozman, a perfectly fine conservative Republican, voted the same way as Crawford, as did Republicans Tim Griffin and Steve Womack in the House.

Cotton, our state’s token Rand Paul/Ted Cruz imitator, said, also on the aforementioned Capitol View, that cheating people buy steak with food stamps and load their choice cuts into big SUVs. So he voted in an unholy alliance providing a narrow majority, one combining liberal House Democrats opposing even modest foodstamp cuts and a few extreme Republicans of his ilk wanting to separate the bills for greater food-stamp cuts.

The state’s farm groups favored passage because of the market certainty the bill would provide, even though the measure would end their popular direct payments and convert their subsidies to crop insurance that rice farmers, dependent on irrigation, don’t normally need.

Reasonable people understand political and economic reality and the value of compromise. Zealots like Cotton often seem not to buy either.

But Cotton probably will try to bail himself out of this jam by declaring victory, albeit tiny. He’ll likely vote for a conference report on the farm bill when the House returns to business in January after a too-long Christmas break, one a week longer than that of the more diligent Senate.

That conference report, worked out last week by appointed negotiators including Crawford and Boozman, will keep food stamps in the farm law, though with a cut of $10 billion. And it will make systemic changes intended to make it harder for people to qualify. The food-stamp cut will be far closer to the $4 billion contained in the original bill voted out of the Senate and opposed by Cotton than the $40 billion proposed in the separated measure by Cotton and other anti-government extremists.

So what might possibly provide Cotton’s imaginative claim to a tiny victory if he, as I predict, votes for the conference report?

It’s that $10 billion in cuts to poor people’s nutrition is more than $4 billion. And it’s that there is a provision in the conference report that was forced by him and his allies to tighten the eligibility for food stamps via bureaucratic conversion from other welfare programs.

He could say, correctly, that his earlier votes were for the purpose of influencing the final policy, but that the conference report amounted to that final policy, thus necessitating a simple yes-or-no vote. He could say he never was against farmers, but only against his personal delusion-money for people pretending to be poor as they load bacon-wrapped filet mignon into their luxury vehicles for transport to their stately mansions.

You might think Pryor could work with that, but you’d be wrong. Sadly, there’s little political currency in Arkansas in standing up for welfare programs for poor people.

Pryor’s more effective point is that Cotton disregarded Arkansas farmers’ interests for Wall Street’s and inflicted harmful uncertainty on farm markets. And that’s the point I suspect Cotton will deflect by voting for the conference report.

But there is this possibility: If Cotton votes against the conference report, he’ll be voting a second time against Arkansas farmers and putting insane risk into his otherwise advantaged position in the race against Pryor. National Republicans banking on his beating Pryor might not stand for that. In fact, I suspect national Republicans prefer to soften Cotton’s image a bit now that the Obamacare fiasco has perhaps rendered the race Cotton’s to lose.

So we will see if Cotton’s zealous extremism has its practical limits. I suspect it doesn’t until and unless we get close to an epic election in which he is the Republican agent to take out Pryor and help the GOP win control of the U.S. Senate.

I suspect that, given a six-year Senate term, Cotton would show us adult doses of Wall Street fealty, home-state indifference and zealous extremism.

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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, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 79 on 12/15/2013