Notes on a primary
There was distressing political news Tuesday out of the Jonesboro area. A perfectly fine and standard conservative Republican state senator, John Cooper, was drubbed in his primary by a rightwing extremist; that’d be state Rep. Dan Sullivan, who was backed by the National Rifle Association.
This was a victory for the Jan Morgan wing of Arkansas conservative Republicanism over the Asa Hutchinson wing. And that can’t be good.
The perfectly fine and standard conservative Republican state senator—endorsed by Hutchinson, who campaigned with him—was punished because he favored Medicaid expansion and opposed a so-called stand-your-ground law by which people could shoot each other more readily.
This was a victory for the causes of throwing poor people off Medicaid and freeing them to shoot first and ask no questions later.
Self-defense laws and self-defense practice have worked perfectly well to protect people who use firearms to fend off legitimate assailants. But the NRA simply will not abide self-thinking B-graded independent-minded Republican legislators in these deepred Southern provinces of these United States.
The right to bear arms would not seem to extend to the right to shoot arms without consequence for feeling scared.
I speak logically and constitutionally. It indeed seems to so extend as a practical matter in certain sections of northeastern Arkansas.
Republicans picked up a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Barbara Webb won by a slightly uncomfortable margin supplied by the fact that the message got out sufficiently that, though the race was comically deemed nonpartisan by constitutional language, she was the designated Republican.
The word got out through endorsements by Tom Cotton and Bart Hester as well as campaign mailers in which Webb touted photo-ops with leading Republicans and highlighted nice things they might have said about her over the years.
The Republican counter is that the other candidate—Pulaski County Circuit Judge Morgan “Chip” Welch— was an obvious Democrat. He’d run for a legislative seat as a Democrat. He’d given money to Democrats before he became a judge.
The differences are that he was infinitely more conventionally qualified for Supreme Court justiceship and did not run as a Democrat, but as a qualified judge. That was surely as practical a consideration as virtuous, since Democrats are pariahs in Arkansas.
State Republicans encouraged turnout in their primary, though their presidential race was a non-event and they had few meaningful local primaries. And the turnout was enough to produce Webb’s margin.
Her election was celebrated in a victory statement from a national Republican group that spent money saying she would save our Supreme Court from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, previously not known to be coming for it.
And it was good news at the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, which put out the non-subtle message that electing Webb would be cheaper for the cause of a business bias in law than trying to pass a tort-reform constitutional amendment.
Joe Biden’s astonishing three-day rally from the dead to Democratic front-runner came from black votes, senior votes, late-deciders, Democrats obsessed above all else with beating Donald Trump, and suburban votes such as those around Houston and Dallas who delivered Biden’s upset victory in Texas.
Jim Clyburn and fellow black voters in South Carolina changed the race. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar accelerated the wild three-day transformation. And Democrats desperate to derail Bernie Sanders’ semi-socialism and then to beat Trump decided between Saturday and Tuesday that Biden either was their clear winner or the best or only emerging excuse for one.
Biden will never again be as politically ablaze as he was for those three transformative days.
He went into Tuesday expecting to win four or five states and run second elsewhere and stay close enough in the delegate count to mount a run on Sanders. He is now the delegate front-runner and the clear favorite to make it to the convention with a plurality that the super-delegates would augment, no doubt to the enragement of Berniacs.
Biden’s job now is to survive heated one-on-one debates with Sanders, assuming Elizabeth Warren does the overpoweringly obvious thing and drops out as Mike Bloomberg did Wednesday. And it’s to try to hold the gaffes and embarrassments to a number and a level of seriousness within what we might call the Biden allowance.
In Biden’s favor is that, for all the noise his backers make, Sanders seems less strong than he was four years ago when he bedeviled Hillary Clinton to the convention.
If the logical two-man race settles in now, Biden ought to be in a position to win 60-40 state-by-state over the next few Tuesdays, padding his delegate lead each week, reaching that fateful point of inevitability as analysts explain that Sanders has no path to a delegate majority and Berniacs explode and threaten a fractured Trump resistance that could re-elect the preposterous one.
But it bears mentioning—and hedging—that this has not been a race accompanied by logic.
Maybe the safest prediction is that Republicans will re-introduce that “Hunter Biden” mantra.