Beware of Democratic candidates for governor who trail in polls when they come to the Arkansas Press Association convention in July for the traditional debate.
In 2002, Democratic candidate Jimmie Lou Fisher won the coin toss and chose to go first.
She proceeded to read, with insufficient inflection, a withering assault on the incumbent Republican, Mike Huckabee.
He then strode to the microphone and won the day by saying, "Well, sounds like it's going to be a good one," as the press people guffawed.
It's called deflection. It's a great talent.
On Friday at the press event in Hot Springs, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mike Ross got first the inevitable question about same-sex marriage.
He replied that he was against it but that the real point was that his Republican opponent, eternal candidate Asa Hutchinson, was wrong on the minimum wage and wrong on tax cuts and wrong on pre-kindergarten education and was woefully out of touch with working-class Arkansas voters.
Ross proceeded to clobber Hutchinson for the full debate. But it didn't matter. Only a few dozen newspaper people and a tiny live-stream audience saw it.
And, within an hour, Republicans had huddled up and decided to put out the word that the story of the debate was that Ross was angry and perhaps overcaffeinated.
Later in the day I appeared on a pundits' panel and said Ross had won but perhaps had mitigated his victory in the eyes of some beholders by appearing overly combative. I saw a few nods.
Here's what I say about that: In a diseased era for our politics in which our major-office combatants cower behind scandalously malicious attacks made by surrogates with secret money, I applaud a candidate who sits at a table with his opponent and takes full personal responsibility for his campaign and for his lambasting of that opponent.
On the minimum wage, Ross said Hutchinson has been paid more for a single speech than a minimum-wage earner in Arkansas makes in a year.
And yet Hutchinson doesn't want the people to vote to raise that wage. He wants to leave that to the Legislature.
On pre-K, Ross said Hutchinson has dared to label as the "wrong direction" the idea to move toward universal pre-K funding so all our kids can get the earlier start that studies have shown time and again to reap human and general economic benefit.
On taxes, Ross said Hutchinson wants only to cut taxes for the middle class while he wants to reform entirely the woefully outdated tax structure.
Fair in each case. Accurate in each case. Relevant in each case. And personally delivered sans surrogate in each case.
And, yes, forceful and sufficiently caffeinated.
And, yes, perhaps a little unnervingly combative for those in the room who prefer their campaign attacks to come from professional narrators of television commercials paid for by some mystery group or merely approved in a dismissive disclaimer by the actual candidate.
The candidates ought to say, "I approved the slander that some anonymous voice is about to commit in my stead."
To be fair, Hutchinson managed to make a couple of good points. One, with which I generally agree, is that it's better to set the minimum wage by fluid legislative action rather than by a harder-to-amend publicly initiated act.
The other is that Asa has been a consistent conservative while Ross, the Blue Dog Democrat who voted in Congress on both sides of the Affordable Care Act, has been a "conflicted conservative."
I explained Ross' problem in the arrowed column Sunday, but it bears repeating and amplifying.
This is the first governor's race in Arkansas since 1966 without an incumbent or clear heavy favorite. It also could be the most seminal governor's election since that one, which launched a modernizing and progressive era.
A Hutchinson victory will conclude that era and cement a new one of garden-variety Southernized conservative Republicanism.
Yet Ross cannot seem to get attention focused on his state issues and the provincial relevance of his race.
That's partly because the Mark Pryor-Tom Cotton race is consuming all the political oxygen.
It's also because the modern digital and cable-news era has transformed Arkansas politics from something peculiar on an in-state basis into nationally homogenized politics.
Now we subjugate our charm and eccentricity to the general national debate, which offers a generic advantage to Republicans and their inertia.
Unless Ross can disturb the inertia to make Hutchinson the issue, much as Pryor has made Cotton the issue, he will face a likely insurmountable task.
Friday's press convention offered Ross' best, if slim, chance. Pryor and Cotton had declined to appear, leaving some oxygen in the Embassy Suites meeting room.
So Ross got caffeinated and went for it admirably.
Then Republicans got on Twitter and called him the angry man.
Ross phoned Saturday to make a case for something I'd already written in a draft, which was that "angry man" was Republican euphemism for debate winner.
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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 07/15/2014