A left-leaning Democrat residing deep in the Arkansas Delta made a social-media post Wednesday to celebrate the great news.
U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, six-term conservative Republican, had forged a dramatic comeback victory in the GOP runoff in Mississippi the day before.
Why would an Arkansas Delta Democrat extol that?
It was because the Republican alternative in Mississippi--a man named Chris McDaniel who had led the ticket in the first primary and seemed the favorite in the runoff by normal dynamics --was a Tom Cotton-ish Tea Party opponent of government programs.
It was because the Arkansas Delta's black brethren on the Mississippi side of the great river, never before Republican voters, had undeniably delivered the victory to Cochran by crossing over.
It was because Cochran is an establishment Republican, more like John Boozman than Tom Cotton.
It was because Cochran sits as a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and has delivered--and now surely will continue to deliver--aid to the Delta that will accrue to the benefit of the Arkansas side.
Indeed, the impoverished Delta is a single multistate region for federal spending purposes. State lines matter less than the shared topography and the shared culture and the shared demography and the shared and pervasive poverty.
Someone in Arkansas with a good idea for a Delta program might go see Boozman and Mark Pryor. But Boozman and Pryor would go see Thad Cochran.
(Cotton would probably go see the Koch brothers.)
This Arkansas reaction punctuates the general strangeness of Cochran's Mississippi comeback, which was both deeply cynical and uncommonly encouraging.
McDaniel had narrowly led the first go-round of three candidates. He entered the three-week runoff period seeming to have the advantage of fervor that would bring his fiery fringe voters back to the polls.
He seemed set to join Ted Cruz and Rand Paul in the destructive wing of the Republican caucus in the U.S. Senate.
But Cochran, aided by big money from establishment Republican donors who believed Tea Party types would marginalize and damage the party, embarked on a bold new strategy.
He made direct appeals to Delta black voters.
Blacks who hadn't voted in the lightly attended Democratic primary were free under the Mississippi open-primary system to vote for Cochran in the GOP runoff.
And Cochran was an appropriator who believed in government and making it work. And the other guy was scary.
And the real race for the Senate seat was on the Republican side; Democrats are anemic in Mississippi, primarily a black party.
The mild cynicism was injecting non-Republicans into the Republican primary. The deeper cynicism came from tactics such as this one: Supporters of Cochran distributed leaflets in black communities saying McDaniel opposed the Affordable Care Act.
Of course Cochran, like all Republicans, also voted against it.
A more honest leaflet would have said, "If you think I'm bad, you ought to get a load of this Chris McDaniel."
But a simple misrepresentation was no doubt more effective.
The uncommonly encouraging factor in Cochran's comeback win--a 6,000-vote margin with nearly 70,000 new voters coming to the runoff--was that, in the end, Mississippians forged a practical governing coalition of diverse but mainstream views in support of a vital government role.
Indeed, there was a European parliamentary feel to the whole thing. Mainstream Mississippi Republicans, meaning those not given over to the Tea Party extremism, effectively combined with black Mississippi Democrats to form a governing majority.
Mainstream conservative interest and mainstream moderate-to-liberal interest made a mutually beneficial accommodation and kept the Tea Party on the outside.
In an angry no-concession speech Tuesday night, McDaniel actually disparaged those kinds of Republicans who "reach across the aisle."
As one who believes a bipartisan coalition of the sane and reasonable is the only way out of our political dysfunction, I find myself sharing to some extent the buoyant mood of the Arkansas Delta Democrat.
But what about that cynical element? Alas, I must also lament that it's an imperfect world, and certainly an imperfect Mississippi.
Ours is a more-perfect Arkansas. Here a Democratic governor and Republican legislators can work out the private-option form of Medicaid expansion.
Here our resident right-wing extremist, young Mr. Cotton, is having trouble getting traction in his Senate challenge to a consummate Democratic moderate in Pryor.
Here we enter the pink tomato season. Here the BLT may not go better with Koch.
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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 06/29/2014