Mark Pryor experienced a public moment of seeming freedom for candor on Monday.
He rose in the U.S. Senate to deliver his farewell speech after getting beat by ignominious proportion in the recent election.
Freedom is, after all, just another word for nothing left to lose.
I suppose you'd get arrested if you used such an opportunity to moon everybody. And you'd get faulted for bad form if you referred colleagues to that place in Nebraska where, according to the old comic strip called The Far Side, the sun, quite oddly, does not seem to shine.
Removed of the constraints of political caution, Pryor turned out to be ... wholly the same.
That would be meek, courtly, solicitous, courteous, polite, genteel, soft-spoken, consummately moderated, carefully modulated, devoutly and demonstrably religious and dedicated still to the sweet and distantly bipartisan idea that politicians of different labels and even different beliefs should be able to compromise and work together for the good of the people.
Oh, and corny. He was still that, too.
Pryor stood in the Senate and repeated that dreadful campaign cant about taking off our red jerseys and taking off our blue jerseys and putting on our red, white and blue jerseys to go to bat for Team USA.
Reports of Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders becoming so moved as to embrace were nonexistent.
Here is what Pryor said, availing myself of generous paraphrasing for purposes of conciseness and clarity:
Being in the U.S. Senate was the great honor of his life, next to serving the Lord, and all the other senators have been like family to him for these 12 wonderful years. And he loves his actual family--mom, dad and his two brothers and his college-age kids. And he so appreciates his girlfriend from grade school with whom he's reconnected post-divorce. But, golly, the Senate, while made up of great folks, is broken and needs to do better. And it can do better only if its otherwise fine members stop being so hyperpartisan and begin to think anew about the needs of the people who elected them. He didn't want to mix church and state, of course, because he never wants to offend. But Jesus said some pretty smart things and one was what we call the Golden Rule. Treating others as we'd like to be treated would be a good place to start.
A writer named Betsy Woodruff who works for Slate was so overcome upon hearing Pryor's remarks that she went straight to her computer and wrote that he had delivered a "God-awful" speech revealing that it was a wonder he hadn't lost to that "awkward political neophyte" by more than 17 points.
She seemed to want more than platitudes, in which case she should have listened to some other lame-duck senator say goodbye.
Pryor is platitude personified.
His clichés are sincere. He doesn't offer them for evasion or finesse or tactic. He offers them as truth. He offers them as depth.
And he's right as far as he goes.
He did get specific enough to say that the now-controlling Republicans ought to take the Senate back to the pre-Harry Reid system and reinstate a regular order of bills with open consideration of amendments.
It turns out Pryor was telling the truth, as usual, when he advised a fundraising group during the campaign that he actually preferred Chuck Schumer to Reid as his party leader in the Senate.
Otherwise, the only news in Pryor's speech was that he is coming home to Arkansas.
Blanche Lincoln stayed home in Washington and went to work taking big bucks to lobby for Republican groups that did her the great favor of helping to beat her.
Pryor conceivably could lobby or otherwise consult from Little Rock. He might go back to the practice of law, though I doubt it.
I'm still leaning toward what I said on television the night of his trouncing, which was that Pryor's religion is so clearly the deepest part of him that I could see him entering the ministry or missionary work.
His sermons might never be as glib or as soaring or as self-rewarding as Mike Huckabee's, which is plenty of commendation right there.
After all, there once was a famous preacher on a mountain who said the meek shall be blessed.
That famous preacher also said that blessings would abound to the peacemakers, such as, presumably, those who lose hateful elections and call on the winners to stop all their fussing.
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 12/11/2014