Early voting begins Monday and I plan, as usual, to get it over with. The only thing the last two weeks are normally good for is louder and frantic racket.
The time is thus perfect for a firing of conventional wisdom’s arrows.
Remember: This is an analytical assessment of perceived standing, not a personal statement of preference.
The abundance of upward arrows must mean I’m mellowing.
Governor Asa Hutchinson—He will win by 20 points or more because he is a Republican in an inert Republican culture, and a fine chap, and a decent governor. He’ll win also because the state’s economy looks better than it is. And he’ll win because his most dreadful policy—throwing people off Medicaid for the political heck of it—is distressingly popular in a mean-spirited state that resents helping poor people.
But we could do worse for a governor, and, after he is gone, very well may.
Tim Griffin and Leslie Rutledge—See final sentence in preceding item. Bluster and right-wing talking points will not lead or manage a state. They’ll mess one up. See Kansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana under Bobby Jindal.
Jared Henderson—Yes, up. The passionate 40-year-old Democratic gubernatorial nominee will lose big. But he will introduce himself as a compelling transitional figure in the new post-Clinton Arkansas Democratic Party, which will have its day again perhaps while Henderson, being young, still lives.
Asa lost three times statewide before winning. Bill Clinton lost. Dale Bumpers lost a local race. David Pryor lost a race for the U.S. Senate. It’s a rite of passage. Arkansas voters like to kick you around and then embrace you as their own because they kicked you around.
U.S. Rep. French Hill—The voters of the 2nd Congressional District aren’t focused as they ought to be on this silk-stocking banker’s vote to remove federal guarantees for equally priced health insurance for persons with pre-existing conditions. Every minute they’re not focused on that is a good and surviving minute for the cowering and coasting congressman.
Instead, too many of those voters are falling for the nonsense that he is the last line of defense against liberal women named Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, who star as Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader in his and his backers’ diversionary and sadly effective television advertising. Nationalize and demonize—that’s how French two-steps around his health-issue vulnerability.
Clarke Tucker—Hill’s Democratic challenger may in fact be closing the gap. There’s a poll in the field that conceivably could show that. And his money-raising is not bad at all. But he’s gone about as far as he can go with a biography as an uncommonly nice young man who beat cancer and has a grandma who’d have been a better candidate. In fact, his campaign is largely one of surrogacy—he emphasizes his kids, his wife, his mom, his sister.
And now, in the best he can offer in the way of going directly after Hill where Hill is vulnerable, he introduces a television spot in which a female cancer victim does his talking to take Hill to task on pre-existing conditions. The spot is effective, even powerful. But it needs to be preparatory to Clarke’s closing the argument himself.
He needs to watch a video of Henderson going after Hutchinson in their AETN debate. Passion and expression thereof, even outrage and anger, do not make one a bad person, but sometimes the contrary. There is a time and place and issue. The 2018 general election is the time. Central Arkansas is the place. Health care is the issue.
Democrats in the midterms—They’ll quite possibly take over the U.S. House of Representatives, probably narrowly.
Republicans in the midterms—They’ll quite possibly gain one to three seats in their U.S. Senate majority.
The Trumpian nation—More confused and divided against itself than ever, largely by the design of the preposterous second-place and Russian-endorsed president.
And, now, a Little Rock mayor’s special:
Warwick Sabin—I’ve gone to two forums and watched two more on Facebook. He consistently knows more than the other candidates and expresses what he knows with greater clarity than the others. If the mood is what I think it is—that Little Rock needs shaking up from City Hall outward—then the time is his.
Frank Scott—That Sabin has done a little better doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with him. He’s likely to make a runoff, and he’ll deserve to be there.
Baker Kurrus—He’s a most admirable man with much to offer who has chosen to run as Mayor Mark Stodola on a bicycle. But there may be a runoff ticket, and victory thereafter, in playing for the status quo and, as is also his apparent strategy, white conservatives.
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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.