The gloves come off

It’s five days until the runoff election for mayor of Little Rock. Surely you could have predicted that the once-positive competition between excellent choices would degenerate at the end into weirdness and conten- tiousness.

The weirdness starts here: I got a call last week from a most reliable source that people had reported to him second-hand that local persons had been called the night before in a “push poll.” That means a poll designed less for a bottom line on preference than to spread negativity in the faux-innocent context of a question.

The report was that the poll was the obvious work of the Baker Kurrus campaign or forces in its behalf. The poll reportedly had made calls into liberal midtown, where Warwick Sabin had led the ticket Nov. 6. Among other things, it asked respondents if it would make a difference to them to learn that Frank Scott was a pastor in a church publicly opposed to same-sex marriage. It’s a Baptist church.

The idea, you see, would be to let liberals and the gay community hear a little something that they might not have heard or considered before and that would trouble them about Scott and perhaps convert them to Kurrus runoff voters.

Kurrus texted me he knew nothing about it. Scott told me he was weary of such tactics and wished people would judge individuals rather than institutions. He said his position of sensitivity and advocacy on gay issues was clear. He said he was moving on.

I asked around in search of someone who could vouch on the record for having received such a call. Finding none, and convinced Kurrus didn’t personally order such a poll and tactic even if it was done in someone’s attempt to help him, I lost interest.

Then, on Monday, television station KARK posted online that it had come into receipt of a poll of this mayor’s race by Public Policy Polling of North Carolina. It showed Scott leading 43-38.

But then KARK quoted Little Rock lawyer Chris Burks, without further identification, as saying the poll meant Kurrus was tied with Scott, considering the five-point margin for error. That was nonsense. One could as easily have said Scott was ahead by 10 points, taking the margin the other way.

Burks is a lawyer, longtime state Democratic Party official and openly avowed and staunch Kurrus-formayor supporter.

Long story short: A few of us starting asking questions on social media about this odd poll and KARK’s weird treatment. That piqued the interest of the Arkansas Times blog, to which Burks revealed that he—acting personally, on his own—ordered up the poll, not to push negativity on Scott, but because he believes in the progressive agenda.

The poll, it turned out, contained the aforementioned question about Scott’s church membership.

Let me summarize: A man highly partisan for Kurrus in the mayor’s race commissioned on his own a poll that contained a revelatory and conceivably negative detail about Scott, and the poll got leaked to Channel 4, which blithely posted an article quoting the Kurrus partisan without citing that partisan’s affiliation.

Beyond that, for further curiosity, the poll showed Burks’ candidate, Kurrus, down five points. That would seem to be nothing to brag about or leak unless a TV reporter let him get away with calling the poll a tie.

So, then, on Tuesday night, and again on Channel 4, Scott and Kurrus engaged in a half-hour’s largely inconsequential debate—except that Scott took a shot at Kurrus’ reputed heroism as the former school superintendent under the state takeover who resisted charter schools and got fired for it.

Scott said Kurrus only got the state appointment in the first place because he opposed Little Rock’s local control. At that, Kurrus nearly exploded through the television screen. He denied it vociferously. Scott said it’s in the press. Kurrus said it wasn’t.

Here are the facts: Shortly after the state took over the Little Rock district because of academic distress of a half-dozen schools and made Kurrus the acting superintendent, a member of the state Board of Education made a motion to keep in place the Little Rock school board as some kind of undefined “partner” of Kurrus.

Kurrus—and it’s in the press— spoke against the proposal, saying he wouldn’t know to whom to answer under such a setup.

I agree with Kurrus that it would have been unworkable for the state to take over the Little Rock schools and put him in as superintendent and then ask him to work with a local board. That doesn’t mean he’s against local control entirely, for he isn’t.

But I agree that Scott had a suitable citation to back up what he said in the debate. Kurrus could have agreed to accept the local board as partner. He shouldn’t have. He didn’t. But he could’ve.

Let’s vote before these fine fellows besmirch not so much each other as themselves.