Partners KATV, Channel 7, and Talk Business and Politics had a solid plan for debates next month in the races for governor and Congress from the 2nd District.
The governor’s debate would pre-empt regular programming to air in prime time not only on KATV, but on KFSM in Northwest Arkansas and KAIT in Northeast Arkansas.
The congressional debate would pre-empt prime-time Channel 7 programming.
“I had convinced the TV stations to get pre-emptions in prime time for both debates, which is very difficult to do,” Roby Brock of Talk Business told me.
The debates would get plenty of secondary exposure on the partners’ websites and social media sites and in subsequent news coverage.
But now they won’t happen — as full-engagement debates, anyway.
The Republicans — Gov. Asa Hutchinson and U.S. Rep. French Hill — declined. Tucked tail.
Presumably they did so either tactically or fearfully. Or maybe both.
Perhaps their tactical consideration was that they were afraid it would do them no good to risk personal, side-by-side and high-profile engagement with those Harvard kids on the Democratic ticket — Jared Henderson in the governor’s race and Clarke Tucker in the congressional race.
Hutchinson’s decline … I get that. Though he is believed to lead his race commandingly, partly because Arkansas tends to like its governors and keep them — unless it was Bill Clinton in 1980 and Frank White two years later — Hutchinson has engaged Henderson already in low-profile affairs.
One was a midsummer debate in Eureka Springs at the Arkansas Press Association, and the other a focused family-issue community forum Monday night that didn’t pit the candidates directly, but by separate presentation.
It’s a justifiable tactical maneuver for Hutchinson to say he’s taken on Henderson already and plenty until the AETN debates late in the season.
His real purpose would be to avoid elevating the articulate Henderson by extending him an aura of equivalence in a higher-profile affair. But that’s politics. It’s like the Hogs not playing the Red Wolves, having all to lose and none to gain.
But I must say that Hill’s decline on engaging Tucker at this point and in that forum seems decidedly less tactically sound and thus more suggestive of cowering, of a scaredy-cat, of a French poodle not only lacking a bite, but even a bark.
The national handicappers have steadily tightened this race from solidly Republican to likely Republican to, now, lean Republican. The next movement in that trend would be to tossup, which must be what Hill fears if he stands side-by-side at this juncture with Tucker before a couple of credible questioning journalists in a generally telecast event.
We’ve not seen any recent polling in this race. Talk Business and Hendrix College plan to go in the field a few days after Labor Day, and we all anxiously await that. But Hill’s behavior suggests more that he knows he’s in a tough race — and therefore is fearful of debate — than that he is well enough ahead to make a tactical call not to bequeath Tucker the elevation to seeming equivalence.
Hill’s supporters have been out at drive time waving his signs. National Republican groups have invaded the state with nonsensical attacks on Tucker for providing legal services to a family foundation. Hill was on TV the other day with a feel-good positive ad. He goes around saying “Clarke Tucker Nancy Pelosi” real fast over and over.
For now, it looks for all the world that Asa is declining for reasons more tactical than fearful and that French is declining for reasons more fearful than tactical.
Apparently KATV and Talk Business and Politics intend to go ahead next with streaming-only telecasts on websites and social media of Henderson and the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, Mark West, and of Tucker in a solo performance.
We’ll see if Tucker sends someone in a chicken costume to all of Hill’s public events.
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.