So there is this liberal writer in New York City by the name of Michael Tomasky. I met and mildly befriended him during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign of 1992.
He currently writes for the partnership of Newsweek and the online Daily Beast. It was the latter that published his recent commentary saying Democrats ought to forget the South because the South is like a veterinarian who takes great glee in performing euthanasia on sick old dogs.
“It’s lost,” Tomasky wrote of the South. “It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be.”
He wrote of the pitiable sight of Mary Landrieu traipsing around Louisiana for the last few weeks trying in obvious futility to salvage the last Democratic Senate seat in the Deep South. He likened her to that toothless, walking-dead dog that was well past the point at which euthanasia would be appropriate. And the South, he wrote, was like that veterinarian who all too happily handled the gassing.
He apologized for the imagery, as do I.
What the South has put to death, he wrote, are “tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded.”
He did say Southerners tended to be nice people otherwise.
He said Democrats can’t win in—and don’t need—any Southern states except Florida and Virginia and, sometimes, North Carolina. He said Georgia and Texas would, in time, experience enough demographic change to become friendly to Democrats, but that Democrats can’t rush that.
The states for which Tomasky seemed to abandon all Democratic hope were Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. That was along with Georgia and Texas for now, until they evolve.
He was referring, basically, to the Southeastern Conference, which meant he was not valuing college football very highly.
Otherwise, he said, Democrats ought to reserve their competition for presidential and congressional majorities to the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, the West Coast and on dots in the West such as Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
Tomasky wrote that Democrats should discard forever that old and now failed Blue Dog conservatizing nonsense about competing in the South. He said the South is all about loving guns, discriminating against gays and imposing a Christian nation. He wrote that Democrats believe unalterably in reasonable gun registration and restriction, in gay rights and in the secular concepts of free religion upon which our nation was founded. He wrote that it’s not worth trying to finesse those views—or spending any money—to engage in the futility of trying to win elections down here.
The congressional seats Democrats will win in the South, Tomasky wrote, are the ones in majority-black districts that likely will stay Democratic without great effort or expenditure.
So the question for us in a state Tomasky tabs for Democratic abandonment is whether he is right.
Yes, he is, probably for a good while.
Think for a moment about the tens of millions that Democrats poured into Arkansas television stations for Mark Pryor against an extremist Republican who offered nothing compelling of his own. Think of how Pryor had spent his 12-year Senate career seeking in great earnest to find centrist ground and avoid the liberal typecasting that would destroy him in Arkansas. And think for a moment about what those Democratic millions and Pryor’s efforts netted.
They netted a miserable 39 percent.
Now think how much better off national Democrats would be if they’d kept that $20 million in the bank for the next go-’round in some friendlier place.
Now ponder the financial irresponsibility of national Democrats spending a cent in Arkansas in two years to try to compete against U.S. Sen. John Boozman. The only exception would be if Mike Beebe ran. But he won’t. Even if he did, I wouldn’t like his chances once Republicans got through explaining that he’s an Episcopalian who supported Obamacare in Arkansas and once fist-bumped Barack Obama on the state Capitol steps. (That was late in Beebe’s campaign for governor in 2006, before Obama became known and thus hated in Arkansas.)
So do you think Hillary Clinton is going to make any difference? Read a poll, including the one showing her trailing even Ted Cruz—Ted Cruz—in Arkansas.
From time to time, Democrats in Arkansas assert that they still can compete in the Second Congressional District, owing to majorities in Pulaski County.
They should talk with Pat Hays, who ran a solid Democratic campaign in this Second District and opened a 10,000-vote lead on Republican French Hill in the count of early votes in Pulaski County.
Hays promptly lost 7,000 of those votes when the early balloting returns came in from Saline County, which is now as Republican as Benton County. And that was well before a single vote got reported from Jason Rapert’s Faulkner County or Harding University’s White County.
By the time they’d finished counting votes in the Oklahoma that rings Pulaski County, Hays had won Pulaski County by nearly 20,000 votes and been routed by much more than that elsewhere in the district.
Pryor, Hays and Mike Ross were the best rightward candidates that Arkansas Democrats had to offer. National Democrats were holding their noses as they wrote checks for the gun-loving and gay-disdaining candidates on whom they were lathering millions.
And for their money they got a red state and a red face.
Tomasky is right that logic and reason suggest that national Democrats should let go of their noses and hang on to their wallets—that they should emphasize areas of friendlier aroma and better return on investment.
Democrats will get their 39 percent down here with or without any money.
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.