Of those I witnessed, the best presentations to a well-attended Arkansas Farm Bureau candidate forum last week came from Mike Ross and Tom Cotton, in that order.

That’s despite the fact that Ross made an ill-advised statement, and Cotton a wildly irresponsible one.

If it’s perfection you seek, avoid Arkansas politics.

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The forum amounted to a halfday parade of shamelessly pandering candidates invariably invoking a deep personal farming heritage.

You had candidates identifying themselves as sixth-generation Arkies, or seventh-generation, or childhood balers of hay and menders of fences and cleaners of manure, or milkers of cows or herders of cattle, or, in one case, a frolicker on a rowcrop playground.

To his credit, fringe-right Republican gubernatorial candidate Curtis Coleman said he couldn’t assert a great deal of personal experience in farming. But he hastened to add that he detested the Environmental Protection Agency and its onerous regulations just the same.

Ross, the presumptive Democratic candidate for governor, led off the parade and offered an effective spiel that amounted to quintessential Arkansiana.

He told about a grandfather living off the land and about somebody in his background who was a preacher. He told about parents who were educators, and about a wife who worked with him in a small-town drug store.

He said he had a top grade from the National Rifle Association and that he owns guns and knows how to shoot them.

I thought he was about ready to lead a hog call when, instead, he scoffed at the charge against him in advertising paid for by the national Republican Governors Association. That’s the assertion that he was a pal in Congress of Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi-indeed, her “go-to guy.”

He said Pelosi probably didn’t consider him her go-to guy when he made a nominating speech for a conservative Democrat running against her for the leadership post.

So then, in the Q-and-A segment, a farmer asked Ross why-if he was so independent of the Democratic Party-he didn’t run as an independent.

Ross answered well enough that he was a lifelong conservative Arkansas Democrat and would remain so although the national party had left him.

But then he said-and this was the part I found ill-advised: “You gotta run as something.”

I understand that key Arkansas swing voters to whom Ross must appeal are independent-minded and ticket-splitting. I understand that confirmed Democrats aren’t going to vote for Asa Hutchinson, the presumptive Republican nominee who nearly dozed through his presentation to the farmers.

But I also think the Democratic nominee for governor needs to show a stronger variation of allegiance to his party, his base, than that-something other than the mere expedience and indifference that Ross invoked.

Cotton, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, gets credit merely for showing up-which Mark Pryor didn’t, oddly-and further credit for confronting head-on his conspicuous opposition to the farm bill that the Farm Bureau wanted passed.

Cotton said the bill was good for some Arkansas farmers, but not all, and that, anyway, the bill was mostly a food-stamp bill.

He said we spend entirely too much money with too little accountability on food stamps. He said waste of that sort must be addressed, and that a back-bencher like Pryor won’t do it.

But then his zealotry got the better of him, as usual, and he said a millionaire could get food stamps.

PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonpartisan group advancing accuracy in political advertising, had long ago adjudged that demagogic rhetoric-committed most prominently by Newt Gingrich-as a “pants-on-fire” falsehood.

It is true that food-stamp eligibility is generally based on income, not assets, and that state regulations for food stamps vary in regard to the specific treatment of assets.

Typically, states count assets that can be instantly accessed for cash, and thus they exempt equity in residences from the asset calculation.

But PolitiFact deemed as “ridiculously improbable” the notion that a man could own outright a million-dollar home but have no income exceeding 130 percent of the federal poverty level, then escape state regulation to get his groceries with food stamps.

I don’t know how the man in such an example would pay his real estate taxes and homeowner’s insurance.

With food stamps, maybe.

Indeed, a pauper’s imprisonment in a lonely mansion would be a high price to pay for food stamps.

After his presentation, Cotton was asked by reporters to name a millionaire receiving food stamps. He was unable.

I’ve advised readers previously: If you see potential food-stamp abuse, call the federal Agriculture Department inspector general’s toll-free food-stamp fraud hot line-(800) 424-9121.

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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 15 on 04/29/2014