The more the merrier
Pols should answer to We the People
“I have told you repeatedly that Dale Bumpers will run for re-election and I don’t believe in running against an incumbent senator that’s doing a good job. I am not going to run for another office . . . . Dale Bumpers doesn’t have to worry about me and George Bush is about 80 percent in the polls. You think there’s going to be a presidential race in ‘92?”
—Bill Clinton to the local press, circa 1990
WORD AROUND the campfire is that Tom Cotton will have at least one opponent in the coming election. Joshua Mahony made it official this week. The name might be familiar because he’s run for office before.
The persistent Mr. Mahony, 38, is an El Dorado native and Democrat in good standing, and, according to Talk Business, is a leader in several nonprofits and a part owner of a natural resources company.
According to a press release: “I’m running for Senate because Arkansans deserve a senator who will put Arkansas first and fight to keep health-care costs down, bring good paying jobs to our state and put the hardworking families of Arkansas above political party and special interests.” Gosh, that sounds like something Tom Cotton might say.
Mr. Mahony ran against Steve Womack in the 3rd District last time out. And lost. But losing has a fine tradition in this country. Not everybody can have a Mike Beebe kind of winloss record. Remember the ol’ boy who lost election after election—for state House, for U.S. representative,
for U.S. Senate, for dogcatcher. Until he finally won the presidency. A. Lincoln was used to losing, until he didn’t.
As the poet, Paul Krugman, once put it in his own lamentable way: Predictions are hard, especially about the future. Tom Cotton is a Republican in a solid Republican state, but a year and a half is a lifetime in politics. A year and a half before George Bush the First was defeated for re-election, by somebody who used to live around here, we remember an article in a national magazine that actually posited a view that the Democrats should nominate him.
G.H.W. Bush was so popular at the time that the theory went that the Democrats couldn’t beat him, so they might as well nominate him— but with a different vice presidential candidate on their ticket. Dan Quayle, they could beat. It was serious commentary, the idea to make George Bush I the first president since Washington to be elected by proclamation.
You remember how that election went.
Tom Cotton will be a tough out, as the sports guys might put it. He’s been a terrific senator, he knows the ins and outs of both local and national politics, and his last name rhymes with “Old times there are not forgotten.” But our considered editorial opinion, which is more considered on this topic than most: The more the merrier. Every politician should answer to the people. And have more than token opposition from a couple of minor-league parties.
Welcome all to this rambunctious democracy and general rasslin’ match we call America.