Tom Cotton said with a scoff last week that Mark Pryor had blamed him for the Ebola outbreak in Africa.
Actually, Pryor did no such thing.
The senator ran an ad pointing out that Cotton voted in a tiny House minority--a mere 29--against continued funding for pandemic preparedness. Pryor's ad invoked the Ebola scare in that context, as something the country ought to be prepared for.
So Pryor is guilty not of blaming Cotton for a virus. He is guilty only of an ill-advised and ineffective television commercial.
Cotton voted for pandemic preparedness later. Anyway, calling attention to Cotton's first vote left Pryor vulnerable to--and deserving of--the wide media ridicule he got for invoking the deadly virus even tangentially in a political context.
Political exploitation of a killer virus is almost always a bad idea, as Jason Rapert perhaps learned. Pryor, normally sensible, should have known that.
After last week's brilliant commercial featuring David Pryor and invoking Mark's life-threatening cancer, it was indeed odd for the Pryor campaign to come in with this Ebola blather. And it was odder still to choose to defend the tactic in a news conference.
Meantime the Pryor campaign failed to take advantage of fresh national news reporting that Cotton has a 100 percent voting record with the Koch brothers' American for Prosperity.
That means Cotton is wholly in league with extreme right-wing billionaires who want to undo government, deregulate business and construct a new America in their vast corporate image.
So Pryor had the warm fuzzy ad about his cancer.
He had Cotton reeling for voting against the Arkansas Children's Hospital. He had new evidence of Cotton's coziness with the Kochs.
It was time to say "100 percent for the Koch brothers; zero percent for the Arkansas Children's Hospital."
Instead, he said "Ebola."
I can only assume Pryor had a grand media strategy that included packing all his misplays into one late-August week pressed up against the Labor Day holiday.
So let me take this opportunity to defend Cotton.
It's not only that he's blameless for a viral outbreak in Africa. It's that he can fairly be blamed for nothing.
That's because he hasn't succeeded in doing anything, thank goodness.
In his brief, just-passing-through experience in the U.S. House of Representatives, Cotton has cast a series of marginalized fringe votes in allegiance to the Club for Growth and the Koch brothers. But he lost all those votes.
He was so far removed from the mainstream of thought that most of his colleagues, being more responsible and pragmatic, and more inclined than him to favor their constituents over the Kochs, voted differently and on the easily prevailing side.
So you can blame Cotton only in the abstract. You can blame him only for the country that might have been, but wasn't, because his votes never counted toward any actual consequence.
Had his votes prevailed, consider the world this would be: There would be no disaster aid for Hurricane Sandy victims, or farm bill, or food stamps, or government-refinanced student loans or Violence Against Women Act or continued funding for graduate medical training of pediatric specialists at the Arkansas Children's Hospital.
There is one exception that proves the rule: Cotton's only votes in his lone term in Congress that counted were those against budgets. That's because those votes led to an actual consequence and a dubious accomplishment. They helped shut down the federal government.
It got reopened largely through leverage exerted by a bipartisan centrist group in the U.S. Senate. The group was led by Republican Susan Collins of Maine and included ... guess who? That'd be Mark Pryor.
Otherwise, Cotton himself has sought to tout his ineffectiveness--to boast in essence of being a losing-side congressman.
Perhaps you recall that Cotton credited himself that not one cent was lost to the Arkansas Children's Hospital on account of any vote he cast.
True indeed. That's because only 49 House members voted on the lunatic fringe with him against children's hospitals. The majority of 352 House members prevailed.
Cotton's campaign mantra might be: My votes never mattered, so don't blame me for them.
Or it could be: Promote me to the U.S. Senate. Needing a super-majority of 60 percent, I'll pose an even lesser threat there to accomplish anything.
And Pryor's campaign mantra ought to be ... well, just about anything other than "Ebola."
------------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 08/31/2014