The handlers of the Republican candidate for one of Arkansas' two U.S. Senate seats thought by now he'd be in high cotton.

After all, Tom Cotton is a Harvard-educated native son who volunteered after law school to serve in the infantry with mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's a first-term congressman. He's now married to a Cotton-pickin', flower-plantin' (just watch his commercials) Virginia attorney. And he's opposed to Obamacare and virtually anything else the president's name might be attached to. One might think that bio would resonate exceedingly well with Arkansas voters.

This guy is Candidate McDreamy for the GOP, and prognosticators spent most of 2013 writing the political obituary for the man Cotton is challenging, Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor.

The returning soldier-hometown boy story line, however, hasn't put Cotton in command of the race. And the millions of dollars flowing into Arkansas in an effort to crush a Democrat deemed "vulnerable" hasn't moved the needle very much, either.

Honestly, months ago we too though Cotton would be running away with this race by this point, just four months from election day. Why isn't he?

Cotton's campaign is trying to make him appear likeable and connected to Arkansas voters in predictable soft-sell ways, but the Super PACs working to help him offer up formulaic packages of Republican hyperbole that assume Arkansans are ready to despise the man who has served as their U.S. senator since 2003. The trouble is, regular folks in Arkansas recognize Pryor as a fellow Arkansan. A big part of that is because of his daddy, a former state legislator, governor and U.S. senator by the name of David Pryor, but Mark Pryor has worked his way up the political ladder, too, as a state lawmaker and attorney general.

We're not saying -- yet, anyway -- who should be Arkansas' senator for the next six-year term. But last week's kerfuffle over Cotton's absence from the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival inspired us to consider why the race is essentially in a dead heat, not the runaway right-wing victory some might have expected Cotton to gin up.

Anyone with any statewide political aspirations has traditionally seen fit to make appearances at the tomato festival and other events like the Gillette Coon Supper. In Arkansas, politics in the 21st century has remained in part a press-the-flesh, meet-the-candidate process. We still feel like we ought to have met the man or woman who wants our vote.

That's where Cotton is hurting. Most folks don't know him beyond the commercials, pro and con. He might be the best man for the job -- that's still to be determined -- but he's falling well short of making Arkansans feel like he's one of us. Reports he chose -- if he had a choice -- to attend the billionaire Koch brothers' secret conference of the super-rich and potentially politically influential instead of the Pink Tomato Festival does nothing to convince voters he's in this race with their futures in mind.

One would think Cotton learned during his time in the Army that one doesn't hand an enemy ammunition.

There's nothing at all wrong with anything Cotton has done -- unless he wants to be Arkansas next senator.