COMMENTARY: Boozman Endorsed Creatively

— It would not be election season in Arkansas if I didn’t read something that prompted my dissent from an editorial endorsement in one of the newspapers with which I’m proudly affiliated.

These fine people run my columns. Thus they contribute to my readership and salary. Then they publish an editorial declaring their newspaper’s formal preference and recommendation in a major political race. Then I get to argue with them a few days later on the very same page.

This indeed is a wonderful life. You would think that one so blessed would be less cranky.

On Sunday, the four partnered local newspapers in Northwest Arkansas published an editorial endorsing Republican John Boozman for the U.S. Senate over the Democratic incumbent, Blanche Lincoln.

This was entirely expected and wholly understandable.

Boozman hails from the area, which is staunchly conservative and Republican, and has long represented it in Congress. He is known, liked and respected by the newspaper editorialists. He is, to be sure, a fine fellow.

If those newspapers had done differently, I’d have needed smelling salts.

But this next paragraph is one the editors in question might want to excise. That’s because I presume in it to get inside their heads and speak for them.

I think these editorialists in question tend to the moderate and independent and pragmatic, not to the doctrinaire or partisan or ideologically passionate, and that, as such, they see things to like in Lincoln’s centrist senatorial service. So they had to labor a bit, to get a tad creative, it seems to me, to make the case for Boozman.

What happened was that I guffawed right off the bat, in the very first sentence.

That was when the editorial explained that one thing better about Boozman than Lincoln was that “his own party doesn’t hound his every move.”

No kidding.

Boozman’s party doesn’t hound his every move because it never confronts any need to do that.

He is a head of cattle that stays herded.

There’s no evidence in Boozman’s congressional career or senatorial candidacy that he thinks for himself independently of his party’s dogma and rhetoric.

It’s as if someone manufactured software from the brains of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and implanted it via a chip inside Boozman’s skull.

Meantime, the very reason Democrats in Washington hound Lincoln is that they must. It’s because she can be irascibly independent and is well-placed enough on the Agriculture and Finance committees to impose her contrary will via amendments during the decisive committee process.

The point is not that she votes 95 percent of the time with President Obama on the floor. It’s that she messes with him before his bills get to the floor.

Lincoln got Arkansas-friendly changes made to the health bill before she voted for it. She got a compromised version of her derivatives regulation plank approved for the financial reform bill.

Rest assured she got hounded aplenty on those issues by the White House and Harry Reid and Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer.

Here’s betting that my editorialist friends in Northwest Arkansas are right. Boehner, McConnell and the other Republican elites will not need to hound Boozman, not a whit. They won’t have to worry about him at all. They can put him and his state entirely out of their minds.

He will regurgitate what they tell him, be it the jeopardizing of Social Security and Medicare or a 23 percent sales tax on your lawnmower instead of a more fairminded income tax. Or maybe it will be a hiatus on infrastructure projects for his state.

They’ll tell him to say one day that the generals ought to run the military and to say the next day that we dare not delegate to the generals the authority to revoke the don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy.

That Boozman will not require hounding is no remote reason to vote for him.

That Lincoln has been hounded half to death is no remote reason to vote against her.

JOHN BRUMMETT IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE ARKANSAS NEWS BUREAU IN LITTLE ROCK.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 10/21/2010

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