Activity is frenzied and the occasion is ripe for the ever-fickle arrows of conventional wisdom.
Gov. Mike Beebe, a lame duck, said recently that he knew his political relevance had waned severely when I did an arrow column and didn't even mention him.
So let's ponder him for a directional firing.
Pondering. Still pondering.
Let's move on.
Asa Hutchinson--Every day that passes when we obsess on the Pryor-Cotton race and emotional national issues like gay marriage and contraception and immigration is a day that the simple inertia of the state's Republicanization sustains, even advances, this three-time loser of statewide races.
I dreamed the other night he was governor.
I wouldn't call it a nightmare. Just a restless sleep.
Mike Ross--This time eight years ago, Beebe had the governor's race wrapped up because of three factors. They were the Democratic advantage still in place at the time, a simple personal narrative beginning in a tar-paper shack, and a simple message that your grocery taxes were going down.
Ross has none of that.
He's counting on the issues of raising the minimum wage and expanding pre-kindergarten, both of which poll well and both of which Hutchinson opposes.
The next governor, whatever his name--He will have to keep a promise to cut taxes while fighting the Koch brothers' local operatives and general Tea Party fringe artisans over the private option, which he'll want to keep because it saves the state Medicaid money for the biennium.
The private option--The more we see it work, the better we will like it.
Mark Pryor--If I were to try to make political points out of a tornado, I would proceed gingerly. I would make sure I wasn't offending the property owner whose damage I was photographing for a commercial.
Couldn't he have shot footage at the home of someone who liked him?
Tom Cotton--He leads in Republican polls, but trails in real ones.
He has U.S. News and World Report venturing into the state to try to figure out why Arkansas voters don't love him the way the Weekly Standard and the National Review and the Club for Growth and the Federalist Society and the Koch brothers do.
It could be that he likes those elitist national right-wing ideologues more than he likes us and our tomatoes.
Arkansas women--They will decide this election--for Pryor, I think, if not, at present, so much for Ross. That's because gender issues are viewed more in a national context than state one.
That's why expanded pre-K and a raised minimum wage are so important to Ross. Women like those ideas more than men do.
But Arkansas politics at the high-profile level is now almost wholly nationalized, a radical change from six to eight years ago.
Our nationalized politics--It's bad for the state. We need to focus on state issues as they relate to the most seminal Arkansas governor's race since 1966.
Yet we think only nationally in our politics, owing mainly to instant and partisan 24-hour national media.
Our political dialogue--These television commercials in the Senate race are dreadful.
Cotton has the Republican sheriff of Faulkner County misstating his repeated votes in opposition to disaster aid through FEMA, not to mention in allegiance to the anti-government Club for Growth that underwrites him.
Cotton said some time back that it's not our job to bail out the Northeast after Sandy. Then he postures as a champion of bailing out Vilonia and Mayflower.
Pryor is back out Bible-thumping. We get it. He is genuinely religious.
He'd make a good missionary if he got beat.
Tim Griffin--He's going to get elected lieutenant governor. Now there is your nightmare.
He's what Tom Cotton would be if Tom Cotton had personality.
Postscript: A reader requests arrows on the ballot issues. It is not time. The citizens' initiatives aren't set.
There still might be a legal challenge on a ballot-title snafu regarding one of the legislatively referred amendments.
But I'd say this much: While I support the idea of statewide alcohol sales, my general rule of thumb is that things are apt to turn out badly any time our people amend our state Constitution.
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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 on 07/13/2014