Parsing politics

They had a capacity crowd and waiting list Wednesday for a panel of pundits-columnists, bloggers, a right-wing radio host and a professor-at the Political Animals Club.

We were discussing Arkansas politics for 2014, which could be the most seminal year in the state since 1966. That was when we cast out segregationist demagoguery for an era of moderating modernism.

Nearly a half-century later, we will find out in 2014 if we go fully red like Alabama and Oklahoma or continue to season our raging Republicanism with peculiar pockets of Democratic survival.

People seem interested in that question. So I thought I’d use this space to tell the rest of you what got talked about for an hour before a couple of hundred people in the Governor’s Mansion reception hall.

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There actually were moments of insightful analysis. Mostly they occurred between Tom Cotton’s getting called “extreme”-which he is-by Arkansas Times blogger Max Brantley and me.

Thoughtful comments also managed to squeeze in whenever “Obamacare” was not being robotically uttered in every sentence by Alice Stewart, the local talk-radio host who can never be forgiven for signing on as communications director for Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign.

The most noteworthy discussion was a casual and seemingly knowing one about Bill Halter’s dropping out of the Democratic governor’s race and running instead for the 2nd District congressional seat against Tim Griffin.

Moderator and club president Rex Nelson fueled the topic by saying the Political Animals Club had scheduled special meetings with all the gubernatorial candidates, but conspicuously hadn’t heard from Halter.

So I offered that Halter will make the switch by Labor Day, but only if everyone quits talking about it.

Jay Barth, the Hendrix professor, said it might not matter. But he said Halter’s moment of truth will come when his campaign costs dip into the $640,000 he has personally lent the campaign.

Roby Brock, the Talk Business and Capitol View guy, said smartly that he couldn’t quite figure out how Halter switches from a governor’s message to a congressional message without the move seeming wholly and solely like political opportunism.

All of that played out in the context of praise for the political skills of Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Mike Ross, who just reported raising a wow-inducing $1.97 million in his first quarter.

And when Brantley said the biggest issue in Arkansas politics for 2014 was whether Democrats could take back the state House of Representatives, I amplified as follows: Ross was part of Rahm Emanuel’s inner circle in 2006 that took back the U.S. House for Democrats.

He knows from those high levels of experience how to target the right races and recruit the right candidates and fashion the right messages and direct the right money.

With a Democratic state House, a Democratic governorship might be worth having. It might sustain a veto, for example.

Naturally we spent time on the looming U.S. Senate race between Mark Pryor, the Democratic incumbent, and Tom Cotton, the extremist-oops, I did it again-of the Club for Growth and a few other Washington remnants of discredited neo-conservatism.

Everyone seemed to agree that this race will present an unprecedented orgy of money and negativity.

That’s because the Democratic majority in the Senate is now imperiled, giving the race heightened national significance.

It also because the best tactic for both sides is to discredit the other-Pryor as Obamacare-supporting, and Cotton as, well, I believe the word is extreme.

On this race, the freshest observation came from Barth. He said new threats to the Democratic majority in the Senate actually might help Pryor.

It could do that, he explained, by forcing liberals angry at Pryor over the woeful background-check vote to rally to his side to try to salvage a Senate majority.

If they thought they could spare him, liberals would give Pryor up.

But if his survival becomes mathematically essential, liberals will switch to grading on a curve and find him to be their new best friend.

Most everyone seemed to agree that Republicans will hold the four congressional seats and the state Senate and wrest a majority of the statewide constitutional offices.

I’m predicting peculiarity amid all of that.

I’m predicting our third consecutive governor named Mike, which, by the way, Roby Brock declared to have been found by a statistician to be against the odds almost prohibitively.

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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.