A man with a background in Democratic campaigns walked up the other day and shared five words.
"Captain Cotton versus Congressman Cotton," he said.
He grinned and walked away. I stood and pondered. Then I got it. And I was peeved I hadn't thought of it.
Tom Cotton is seeking to run as "Captain Cotton," meaning the admirable young man who interrupted a cushy lawyering career to enlist and perform two tours of combat duty as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Democrats want to run against "Congressman Cotton," meaning the one-term extremist who has voted against disaster aid, farmers, student loans, women and the Arkansas Children's Hospital.
Part of the battle for the U.S. Senate between Mark Pryor and Cotton comes down to which of these Cotton incarnations prevails in the public consciousness.
The other part, probably the bigger part, is whether voters can separate Pryor from the drag of the uncommon enmity in Arkansas toward the current American president of his party.
Meanwhile, though, the battle of the Cotton incarnations rages.
Cotton so stresses his military service that it's almost as if he says "I was an Army Ranger" before he says hello.
On Friday morning on Alice Stewart's Republican radio show, Stewart introduced Cotton in the context that he was locked in a heated battle with 60 days remaining until the election.
By a wild non sequitur, he replied:
"Sixty days till the election. That's going to be a lot of fun. That's actually less time than I spent in Ranger school. And in these 60 days I will get a full night's rest and three square meals a day and I won't have to lay [sic] in mud holes when it's 29 degrees."
Did you get that? Cotton was an Army Ranger. Training was arduous. It was cold and muddy and a sacrifice for the country.
Running a campaign against a guy like Pryor is child's play.
War heroes have run for president and lost. Bob Dole and John McCain come to mind.
The reason they lost is that voters separated their admirable military records from their lesser political appeal, then voted according to the lesser political appeal.
Those voters did not abandon respect for military sacrifice. They merely made an assessment that military heroics alone do not commend a person for the presidency.
Of course there's an even starker case. George McGovern, a decorated bomber pilot over Germany in World War II, lost in a landslide in 1972 to Richard Nixon, a naval officer who saw no combat in the war.
In that race, the war hero McGovern was creamed as an anti-American peacenik. Of course one of McGovern's mistakes was that he was the anti-Cotton: He ignored advisers' urgings to talk about his war record.
World War II veterans were famous for not talking about their service. My own father was a Marine infantryman on Okinawa. He would never discuss it, much less run for office based on it.
John Kerry also comes to mind, although his case was different. Republicans didn't merely seek to separate his politics from his military service. They smeared his military service and somehow got away with it, perhaps because stereotypes make it easier to smear a Democratic war hero than a Republican one.
Pryor and Democrats wouldn't dare attempt to minimize Cotton's service. They merely want Arkansas voters to fashion a warrior-politician separation of the kind that national voters made for Dole and McCain.
Pryor's greater challenge may be getting voters to distinguish him from his party's president, Barack Obama, a man who has single-handedly constructed a Republican insurgence in Arkansas.
The president's already dreadful approval ratings have plummeted in Arkansas to a point at which only three in 10 in the state approve of him.
That Pryor stands at 40 to 45 percent in the polls means Pryor is winning the support of one to two among those seven who have disdain for Obama.
He needs to round that up to a full two.
It's a challenge, but do-able, especially if he can get voters to compare him to Congressman Cotton and not Captain Cotton, and especially if he can get voters to stop and think about the fact that they've voted against plenty of soldiers.
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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 09/09/2014