Former President Bill Clinton headlined the kickoff of U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor’s campaign for re-election in downtown Little Rock on Saturday, endorsing him for a third term.
The event at the Statehouse Convention Center, which also featured Gov. Mike Beebe and Pryor’s father, former Arkansas Gov. and U.S. Sen. David Pryor,attracted about 600 supporters and raised $1 million.
A hot topic at the cocktail get-together was the Club for Growth’s recent television advertisement targeting Mark Pryor and tying him to President Barack Obama, saying Pryor was the only member of Arkansas’ U.S. delegation to vote for Obama’s healthcare overhaul.
The club spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the ad, which aired across Arkansas.
“I didn’t come here to criticize these independent groups, but let me take this opportunity to do so,” Pryor said to the laughing crowd. “I’m not ashamed of being bipartisan. I’m not ashamed to try to find common ground. This is the way it is supposed to work … and this is the way I work.”
Clinton compared Pryor -a Democrat from Little Rock - to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, who ignored party lines when working with Obama during super storm Sandy last fall. Clinton praised Pryor’s willingness to work with both parties in Congress and said “creative cooperation triumphs over stupid, inane conflicts designed to keep people upset.”
“The Club for Growth is the most misnamed organization in the United States of America. They have not produced growth. They have not produced jobs,” he said. “If they were a real club for growth, they would support Mark Pryor, who supports a balanced budget based on arithmetic … and that brings the debt down.”
David Pryor, who served as Arkansas governor from 1975-79 and then in the U.S. Senate for 18 years, called the group “faceless, selfish men who refuse to carry their share of the load or to disclose their names in public.
“Mark Pryor does not and will not dance to their tune,” he said.
Mark Pryor faces very different circumstances than when he won a second term in 2008.
Now, Republicans hold five of Arkansas’ six congressional seats. The state Legislature is dominated by the Republican Party, and both Democratic and Republican party leaders say that Pryor’s Senate seat will be one of the most-contested in 2014.
“Right now, the Pryor Senate seat is at the top of our target list,” David Ray, spokesman for the Arkansas Republican Party, said in an interview Friday. “We view that as a prime pickup opportunity.”
Ray described Pryor as a “weak incumbent” and pointed to a 2011 Congressional Quarterly report that showedPryor’s votes matched with Obama’s preferences 95 percent of the time, while Arkansans overwhelmingly voted against Obama in last year’s presidential election.
But, at his first campaign event of the cycle, Pryor pointed to National Journal reports that have consistently ranked him in the middle of most-conservative and most-liberal senator listings.The Journal’s 2012 report ranked Pryor as the 49th most-conservative and the 51st most-liberal senator in Congress.
“There’s been all this analysis in Washington about this race, but this race is about one thing plain and simple: It’s about Arkansas,” Pryor said. “The reason you see this outside special interest coming in and buying TV and radio time is because they know what kind of senator I’ve been. The National Journal says I’m one of the most independent senators in Washington and it drives them crazy.”
Pyror didn’t face a Republican opponent in 2008 and was re-elected with about 79 percent of the vote.
While no Republican has officially announced a run against Pryor, Ray said the state Republican Party has three top candidates in mind and is confident at least one of them will run.
He wouldn’t say who those three were, but U.S. Rep. Steve Womack from Rogers told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last month that he hasn’t ruled out running for the Senate. Media reports have also named U.S. Rep. Tom Cottonof Russellville as a possible contender.
The campaign for Pryor’s seat will be one of the more expensive in the country, his campaign manager, Jeffrey Weaver, said.
“There will be tons of money spent on both sides,” he said. “You’ll see a lot of money being spent by Washington outside groups who want to buy this seat, but we’re not going to let that happen.
“This is Arkansas’ seat and they should be able to pick and choose who they want as their senator … It’ll be a long, hard race, but we are up forthe task.”
Pryor hadn’t set a campaign fundraising goal, but speakers at the event indicated that the $1 million raised on Saturday shows Arkansans support Pryor.
“These dollars come not from New York, not from Washington, not from Chicago, L.A., Wall Street. These dollars come from Arkansas. They don’t come from someone who is anonymous, secretive, an elitist band of billionaires from off somewhere … These dollars are from right here in Arkansas,” David Pryor said.
Clinton said votes in Congress are increasingly controlled by national groups with out-of-state funds and that money spent toward the state’s Senate seats are meant to mislead Arkansas voters.
“Surveys show people of Arkansas still really like Mark Pryor, but they get force fed all this stuff designed to trigger our psychological resentments and stop us from thinking,” Clinton said. “There are all these people trying to spend millions of dollars so they can turn voters into zombies … Modern politics is disproportionately rigged to get outside influence and outside dollars.”
Candace Martin, spokesman for the Arkansas Democratic Party, said Republicans are power-hungry and eager to take over all of Arkansas’ U.S. delegation. Voters should look at the issues and not get sidetracked by negative remarks, because this race isabout Arkansas, she said.
“It seems like all the Republican Party is interested in is political power,” Martin said. “That couldn’t be farther from what Sen. Mark Pryor is interested in. He is for Arkansas … that is how he is going to be winning re-election, because he is focused on Arkansas.”
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 03/17/2013