Vince Insalaco, the state Democratic Party chairman, did something odd the day after his party’s candidate lost the special election for the key state Senate seat in Jonesboro.

He put out a statement saying he would not congratulate the Republican winner, John Cooper.

He said he could not “condone the negative and divisive methods [Cooper] used throughout his campaign.”

I was positively jarred. It’s basic politics in such cases to appear respectful even when you aren’t. It’s to erect a dutiful facade. It’s to say, if nothing else, that the voters have spoken and, well, that’s what they said.

I was not alone.

Over lunch the other day, Insalaco related that high-level figures in his party had vigorously disagreed with his failure to extend a pro form a apology.

So, really, what was his deal?

He showed me mailers sent out, not by Cooper or his campaign directly, but by a national Republican political action committee. Mainly, he emphasized one of them.

That mailing displayed a tampered photo of President Barack Obama-one putting the president’s head on a fake bow-tie and small body. It showed this image of Obama controlling the local Democratic Senate candidate, Steve Rockwell, with puppet strings.

Insalaco thinks the image had racist intimations and says black people told him they saw it that way.

Part of the text stated that Rockwell was tied to a “radical group” further identified as a “student group that works to advance all of Obama’s radical agenda, including cap and trade and gay marriage.”

Insalaco told me he is neither naive nor innocent, and that he’s a longtime political operator who knows how to put out an attack mailer.

But this one, he said, was different.

Alleged racist intimations aside-and I’m not sure I see those-Insalaco said the mailer attacked as “radical” a small army of collegiate Young Democrats from around Arkansas. He had recruited the youths to spend part of their Christmas break doing grassroots and retail politics to canvass the district in Rockwell’s behalf.

“These are teenagers from Hendrix and other places,” said Insalaco. “They don’t deserve this. They’re probably too young to even know what cap and trade is.”

Indeed, the collegiate Young Democrats whom I’ve encountered in Arkansas are not radical. They’re not trying to overthrow anything. They’re merely agreeable to such things as the private-option form of Medicaid expansion, a brainchild of state legislative Republicans.

Yes, maybe they have a greater acceptance of gay marriage than the everyday Arkansan. But here’s a scoop: That isn’t radical. It’s generational. And it’s getting more mainstream by the minute.

Insalaco said he declined to extend congratulations for carefully considered reasons, not emotionally.

For one thing, black constituents are essential to the Arkansas Democratic Party even as the party finds it necessary to keep an ideological distance from this black Democratic president. But Insalaco said the very least the party could do was take a stand against the trivialization or racial exploitation of that president.

For another, those young people are important to the future of the Democratic Party, he said. Assailing them as “radical” for having the temerity to go door-to-door for a state legislative candidate simply should not be accepted as routinely symptomatic of rough-and-tumble politics, Insalaco said.

I see his argument.

It’s one thing to send out attack mailers deliberately distorting a candidate’s positions. It’s not right, and it’s cancerous on our politics, but it’s not unusual, and, alas, everybody does it.

Insalaco himself stands accused by Republicans of unfair mailers from his pre-chairman days as a professional Democratic consultant. But at least his attacks were directed to the opposing candidate.

To inflict collateral damage toward kids, and to display the president in a way that some people might infer as racist-that’s a step or two beyond the garden-variety political disgrace.

It is not so different, though, as to

warrant Insalaco’s unwillingness

to extend a simple insincere congratulations.

Insalaco was politically ham-fisted. He inevitably made the story his own seeming poor sportsmanship instead of the substance of what he found objectionable.

Anyway, Cooper’s campaign didn’t send out the mailer. A national Republican group did.

To that Insalaco asks: How did a Washington political action committee know that Arkansas college kids were going door-to-door in Jonesboro? Some local Republicans had to have provided that information.

The real message, I’m sensing, is that Insalaco is telling us the game is on and that he will play by the rules he sees.

The Democrats want to gain at least four seats in the state House of Representatives to take back the majority. It’s a priority. There will be highly contested legislative races in places like Arkadelphia and Conway.

We’re embarking on an epic-Insalaco called it “nuclear”-political year in this state.

“If this is the way it’s going to be, then OK,” he told me. “If there aren’t going to be any grown-ups in the room, then OK.”

Watch out, Republicans. The Democratic chairman thinks you’ve asked for it.

The rest of you should approach your mailboxes with caution.

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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 77 on 01/26/2014