Local media coverage reported that, conspicuously, Tom Cotton did not attend the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival last weekend.
That event is traditionally a command Arkansas political performance. It encompasses a tomato-eating contest among candidates. It's up there with the Gillett Coon Supper, the Slovak Oyster Supper and the Hope Watermelon Festival.
It's in Cotton's congressional district, which he nominally represents in this two-year period of attempted transition to U.S. senator.
Mark Pryor, Mike Ross, Asa Hutchinson--they were in Warren, of course, chomping down.
National coverage from the liberal publication called The Nation, citing leaked information, reported that, instead, Cotton spent the weekend at a luxury California getaway in Dana Point called the St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort.
Cotton was reported to have attended a secret retreat put on by the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, and attended by big donors. There was said to have been golf, angus filet mignon and panel discussions in which Republican stars talked with big donors about conservative principles.
I qualify all of that because I couldn't get Cotton's campaign to confirm or deny or say diddly about this reportedly lavish Kochian affair.
All the Cotton campaign did by way of reply was put out a lengthy statement on all the Lincoln Day dinners Cotton has attended in the state, and all the 5K runs he's entered in the state, and that time he went to the Benton-Bryant basketball game.
Why, Pryor missed a Farm Bureau event and raised money in Hollywood, the Cotton campaign countered.
Pryor's campaign put out a news release assailing Cotton for secretly "hobnobbing" with "billionaire backers" in "California luxury" while real Arkies were celebrating the glorious ripening of the famous Bradley pinks--and while real Arkie politicians were mingling with the voters they represent rather than with distant billionaires whom Cotton seems more inclined to represent.
Pryor's pouncing on the report was understandable. Nothing better serves the Pryor narrative of this big race for the U.S. Senate.
Pryor's theme is "putting Arkansas first," and he will tell you he inherited that dictate from his popular father, David. His prevailing characterization of Cotton is that the young Republican primarily serves national conservative aims and certain national conservative benefactors--the Kochs and the Club for Growth, primarily.
Even by its most positive interpretation, Cotton's fast-rising political career has seemed primarily in service not to narrow back-home constituent needs, but to broader and loftier conservative principles.
Why else represent a tornado-prone state and vote against disaster aid? Why else represent a farm state and vote against the farm bill?
This report would be mildly gargantuan, even fatal, in the insular and populist Arkansas that existed until, oh, about the time Barack Obama ran for president.
It is possible now that the rural populists of Arkansas so despise Obama that they'll vote for a Republican, any Republican, even one who acts like he's too good for their 'maters.
Meantime, the Cotton campaign takes strenuous objection to my writing Thursday that the essence of Tom was his willingness to let the nation default on debt and invite a market freefall to "take our medicine now."
Cotton's press aide usually won't answer my questions--because I've been so mean to Tom--but he'll eagerly critique my columns on social media. And this spokesman, David Ray, tweeted that it was just like me to assail Cotton's recklessness on the debt ceiling when, in fact, Pryor voted four times in the early-to-mid-2000s against raising the debt limit.
Thus it would seem that the Cotton campaign's defense against a charge of recklessness is that Pryor was reckless, too.
I have no defense to offer for Pryor's expedient and irresponsible votes. I merely would point out the full and fair context that they were throw-away votes, cast in a certain minority for the hollow purpose of appearing to care about debt. I also would point out that Pryor has now voted seven times consecutively, by my count, to raise the debt ceiling.
Cotton is part of a group of zealously conservative Republicans actually willing to have their votes count to take the country into default and shut down the government.
In fact, Cotton and his Republican brethren shut down the government last fall, though not over the debt ceiling, but from failed enactment of a continuing budget resolution. After a 16-day shutdown, a group led by Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, and including Pryor, worked out an accommodation to get government reopened.
Pryor cast wimpy and pointless votes. Cotton cast extreme votes.
Pryor cast tactical votes. Cotton cast sincere votes.
That's a clear choice--the wimpy, tactical moderate or the sincere extremist.
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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 06/22/2014