U.S. Rep. French Hill, in what is potentially the political fight of his life against Democrat Clarke Tucker, gave an interview Monday to Roby Brock of Talk Business and Politics.
I sat by watching and listening while I waited for my regular weekly session on the digital telecast.
On my turn, Brock asked what the Republican and Democratic messages should be for the fall as control of the U.S. House of Representatives hangs ominously in the balance — ominously because a Democratic House would impair President Trump’s power and maybe even impeach him, depending on what comes of the Robert Mueller investigation.
I basically said the Republican message ought to be pretty much what Hill had just said, rather deftly, I thought.
He said he disagreed with Trump’s policies and practices on trades and tariffs and had tried to “push back.” He said he was not comfortable with Trump’s comportment at Helsinki, but that Trump had “walked back” his Russian-friendly rhetoric.
Hill said that — regardless of what the president had said — the actual American policy currently executed toward Russia is tougher than it’s been in a good while. And he said the economy is good — that 4 percent growth in a quarter is just one quarter, but encouraging for job growth, wage growth and investment growth. He said that policies advanced by Trump and congressional Republicans — the tax cut, mainly — were in some measure responsible for the good news.
It seemed to me that Hill’s emerging political message is that the president isn’t always right or appropriate in what he says or tweets or even does, as on trade or Russia, but that the proof is in the policies and their performances, which are anywhere from good to promising to hopeful.
I could hear the banker Hill telling the old boys in Saline and Faulkner and Perry and Conway counties that maybe sometimes he wished Trump wouldn’t tweet or behave that way, but, by golly, the president is not nearly as bad as the Democrats let on and the proof’s in the puddin’, which is tasting a little like grandma’s banana puddin’ with the vanilla wafers.
The Democratic message? I didn’t quite know where I was going when I set off on a stream of consciousness in response to that. But I rambled around to a place I rather liked.
It’s a variation on the above theme. It’s that a new CBS poll found that, in congressional battleground districts, 62 percent of respondents disapprove of Trump’s style but a lesser number — 51 percent — disapprove of his job performance. It’s that the way to appeal to decisive swing voters in those battleground districts is to say that, regardless of what you think about the economy, this president’s personal behavior is mercurial, reckless and worrisome, especially if unchecked.
It’s that the best way to put a check on that behavior is to turn over one — just one — chamber of the Congress to the other side.
Part backstop and part baby-sitter — that’s kind of what I’m talking about.
Bear in mind I’m applying that message to “battleground” districts around the country, where the race is close enough to go either way. Those are mainly metropolitan suburban areas, particularly among moms who know a bratty child when they see one.
We’re not to that point yet in the Hill-Tucker race in the 2nd District. The race here remains “lean Republican,” down from “likely Republican.” Tucker has some work to do — by emphasizing health care and his personal credentials — before getting to the point at which he might argue that applying a tactical check on Trump’s troubling behavior — not his policies, necessarily — could commend his candidacy.
Mainly what we need is a president who has to “walk back” less and a House of Representatives that doesn’t “push back,” but says “no.”
That should accrue to the advantage of tactically smart Democratic congressional candidates in battleground districts. It’s why the CBS poll has Democrats up 219-216 if the House races were held today.
That’s with the 2nd District nestled a tad uncomfortably in the 216 — uncomfortably enough that Central Arkansas conceivably could wind up relevant to the compelling and consequential national narrative to play out this fall.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.