A quick recap
Allow me to catch you up on the big U.S. Senate race. Mark Pryor is afraid of a free-form televised debate with Tom Cotton. So he is accepting only debate proposals offering a more restrictive format.
Cotton is catching deserved criticism for hanging out at a resort in California with the Koch brothers and other billionaires rather than attending the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival. Let’s amplify in that order. Pryor is a mild-mannered moderate with a mushy manner. He is incurably meek and polite, qualities normally admired but not necessarily well-suited for freestyle debating.
Cotton is direct and sometimes derisive. Those are not universally admired qualities. But they would lend themselves to effectiveness in free-form debating with a fellow who didn’t enjoy that kind of thing.
A couple of commercial television stations have proposed debates in which a segment would be devoted to the candidates asking each other questions and talking with each other independently of a panel of questioners. Cotton jumped at those opportunities. Pryor stalled. Here’s how direct byplay might go: Cotton: “You cast the deciding vote for Obamacare, you liberal, liberal, liberal.”
Pryor: “Well, not really, though I did vote for it, because, while it’s not perfect and we need to fix the parts that aren’t working and …”
Cotton: “Let me interrupt you right there. I just want to say … Obamacare, liberal, woo pig, sooie.”
Pryor: “Well, I also support the Red Wolves and the Golden Lions and the Bears and the Trojans and the Reddies and the Boll Weevils and the Muleriders and the Wonder Boys and …
Cotton: “I said ‘woo pig, sooie’ and that’s what I meant. It’s time to pick a team and stay put. We’ve got to make the tough choices.”
It turns out that Pryor has accepted two tamer debate offers that Cotton hasn’t. One is a standard-format event with strict rules and timekeeping as part of the usual array of unwatched fall debates on the Arkansas Educational Television Network. The other is from the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce on limited subjects—education, economic development and transportation.
Cotton is scoffing at the protective and limited nature of those proposals. Why, the very idea of a debate on restricted issues. But Pryor is saying the situation seems to be that he’s accepted two debates that Cotton hasn’t.
On Friday a reporter for KATV, Channel 7, which has proposed a debate on which Pryor stalls, ambushed Pryor and followed him into an elevator to press him on the debate issue.
On Sunday on Capitol View on KARK, Channel 4, which also has proposed a debate, Pryor said the voters were tired of the race already and that he wasn’t sure a third debate was needed.
We’ve already missed out on a tomato-eating contest. That’s because Cotton made that choice a few weekends ago not to attend the annual Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival. Instead he hobnobbed with the Kochs and billionaire right-wingers at a luxury resort in California.
Pryor and Democrats are trying to make a major issue of that. Cotton’s campaign is pooh-poohing it as trivial. Here’s what Cotton’s spokesman, David Ray, put on Twitter the other day: ” ‘Kochs. Blah. Secret! Kochs! Evil! Blah! Stop Tom Cotton’— Pryor fundraising email or John Brummett column. Take your pick.”
It is, in fact, a big deal, and here’s why: Pryor hanging with Arkansas festival-goers and Cotton secluded in luxury with the Kochs—that’s a metaphor for, and a microcosm of, the campaign.
It invites the question as to whom Cotton intends to represent, which, actually, isn’t a hard question.
In his one term as a congressman he has served rich anti-government benefactors like the Club for Growth by opposing federal disaster relief, which is often vital to the tornado-prone and flood-prone Arkansas region he actually ought to represent.
Cotton represents a new Arkansas political generation that believes it can win in a new culture—nationalized, thoroughly Republicanized and heavily monetized.
That thinking dismisses the state’s traditional retail political culture as a relic, like the name Pryor.