A mission of atonement

HOPE

The need to atone motivates powerfully. It can make a cheating spouse sweet and attentive. It can turn a backsliding preacher into a repentant weeper.

So Tom Cotton sought to atone with watermelons on Saturday for what he failed to do with tomatoes in June.

That is immerse himself in their traditional Arkansas festival.

There was no Koch brothers' retreat this time to beckon him elsewhere. He was all-in for melons. A steady rain wasn't going to stop him.


Cotton even brought along a big campaign RV as well as his new wife, the former Anna Peckham. She's a conservative lawyer in Washington who did a stint as an assistant U.S. attorney in Montana.

The two of them ran together for a while in the Hope Watermelon Festival's 5K race.

He eventually sped away from her for a time of 19:59. She came along not long after for her best time ever.

The new Mrs. Cotton also was a Chatty Cathy. She stood beside Tom as they talked in the rain with local volunteers outside the RV near the festival midway.

It surely was a long way from Montana or Federalist Society meetings in New York or Washington.

Obviously Cotton is seeking in earnest to counter two fast-spreading critiques that have kept him mired in a tie, more or less, with Mark Pryor.

One is that Cotton cares more about national conservatism and his career than about Arkansas. The other is that Cotton is cold and personally aloof on the campaign trail.

The candidate seems to be a studied and focused type who is learning to do better in his interpersonal relations.

But you still can find yourself looking around for him at a watermelon festival only to realize he is talking with people only a yard or two away.

The best Arkansas politicians--Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Dale Bumpers--always made themselves known more widely and readily than that.

They filled their space. They dominated their area.

Everyone else shook hands. They glad-handed.

Everyone else received an overture. They extended the overture.

It's charisma, a strong personality, star quality. Arkansas Republicans have a guy like that. It's Tim Griffin.

Failures in those areas don't make Cotton a bad person. They make him reserved, self-contained, a touch awkward, perhaps shy and, altogether, a less-than-effective retail politician.

It is not good politics for voters to walk past you at a watermelon festival and not know you are there.

Or at least it once wasn't. The Cotton-Pryor race will tell us whether retail politics now matters less--whether we are, as it has been put in this space, now totally nationalized, monetized and Republicanized.

We surely are different.

Clinton didn't deal in his Arkansas days with "trackers." Those are agents of the other side trying to sidle up to a politician's conversations with voters.

They carry recording devices seeking to catch the candidate saying something exploitable or distortable. The Internet is but a click away.

As Cotton talked with people Saturday, two young women working for Democrats sought to get near him with their recording devices extended. Two Cotton aides stood between them and the candidate, keeping them at a distance and holding campaign signs to block their views.

It went on that way for several minutes. It was a political scrum, as someone described it on social media. It also was a metaphor for contemporary politics.

I joked that a movie, a romantic comedy, was occurring to me.

A young male aide to a candidate spends a campaign season blocking a young female tracker to keep her from the candidate. They hate each other.

By the end of the campaign--or the movie, as it were--and after hours of steadily softening stare-downs, they've fallen in love.

A young Democratic tracker rolled her eyes at the very thought. David Ray, Cotton's communications aide who was obstructing her with a Cotton sign, told me he was happily married--to, in fact, the producer of Republican operative Alice Stewart's morning radio show in Little Rock.

Of course. There's your direct link between contemporary conservative politicians and their echo chamber in the talk-radio wasteland.

Later Cotton ventured to the "politically correct watermelon-eating contest." He took on Pryor and other candidates in sloppy and dignity-discarded pursuit of the greatest volume of melon consumption.

The things an Arkansas politician must endure.

The local sheriff won, as usual.

Republicans were snickering that Pryor competed while someone held an umbrella over him to protect him from the rain.

As it happened, Pryor had told his staff he didn't want any of them holding an umbrella over him. The gesture, I am advised, was extended by "some random person."

Oh, well. It would only be news if George Soros had been holding Pryor's umbrella, or if one of the Koch brothers had been holding one over Cotton.

------------v------------

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 on 08/12/2014

Upcoming Events