EDITORIAL
EYE ON ARKANSAS
Ice cold
6
AUGUST 8, 2013
ARKANSAS TIMES
PAUL BARROWS
R
epublican politicians do not empathize well. “My job is to get mine,” Ronald Reagan used to say. “I’m not my country’s keeper just because I’m in the White House.” A giant of indifference, his party loved him for it. There’s even a kind of Republican, colder than Reagan, who enjoys being rescued from stormy waters, then pulling the ladder up before anyone else can climb it. (If they can contrive to push overboard the person who saved them, so much the better. “Go be a Democrat, you sissy” they yell gleefully. Sometimes they use a different word.) U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas benefited hugely from affirmative action in his shocking rise to the top of his profession. At the top, he’s a ruthless foe of affirmative action, even when watching his pornographic videos. “Long Dong Silver didn’t need affirmative action,” he likes to say. As a young man, Dick Cheney obtained dozens of student deferments to avoid military service in Vietnam. He explained that he had “other priorities” than serving his country in combat. Later, as secretary of defense (we still wonder if the appointment of a draft dodger to lead the Defense Department started as a joke, and then got out of hand) and as vice president, he arranged to send thousands of young Americans off to die unnecessarily. Many of these had other priorities too, presumably, not eager to lay down their lives to make politicians look good. Cheney explained that poor blacks and whites aren’t allowed priorities during Republican administrations. U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton of Dardanelle, now seeking a U.S. Senate seat, is Republican through and through, convinced that American presidents have been too nice to the American people. Last week, he voted against loans for college students in need. He did so, even though he’d taken student loans himself to attend Harvard, of all places, and even though his vote shocked those members of his party only moderately cruel. Pressed for elaboration, he explained that President Obama was at fault. This was not Cotton’s first boldly cruel vote, though perhaps the most boldly hypocritical. He’s voted against food stamps, though many of his constituents will go hungry without them. He’s voted against health care for those same impoverished constituents. The modern Republican Party is largely built on hatred. As far back as the adoption of the Southern Strategy, Republicans decided no more Mr. Nice Guys. Mitt Romney said last year that 47 percent of Americans aren’t worth killing. Cotton clearly thinks Romney’s estimate is too low, and he’s more willing than Romney to chastise the unwanted. He could be a Republican star in the making, a great shame to his native state.
SUNSET CRUISE: The Mark Twain Riverboat on the Arkansas River. Paul Barrows submitted this photo to our Eye On Arkansas Flickr website.
Beware your TV
O
ur print deadline fell before the beginning of the free barbecue in Dardanelle at which Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton was to announce his challenge of Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor. I’m already depressed thinking about the avalanche of 30-second TV ads soon to descend on Arkansas. The campaigns themselves will spend millions. Millions more will be spent by other groups, some more shadowy than others. Most will intone end-of-theworld predictions about one candidate or the other. We likely will get a taste of positive politics. If Pryor indeed has no primary opposition, he might spend some millions with some aw-shucks footage of Mark Pryor, his famous father and his undeniably pleasant demeanor. Cotton will spend some time talking about his Yell County boyhood. You may be sure he’ll say a lot about his Army experience, with high-power weaponry on frequent display. But the news will mostly be bad. Negative advertising moves more voters than positive advertising and that’s how the election will be won — moving undecided voters. Cotton’s entry was heralded by release of a poll done for AFSCME, the public employees union. It showed Pryor leading Cotton, 43-35. But that’s a good distance short of 50 percent. Worse was Pryor’s favorability rating. It stood at 47-34 positive. Not as bad as Blanche Lincoln before her ill-fated re-election race, perhaps, but a sharp decline from 63-23 six years earlier. Republicans have spent millions beating him up. He’s also hurt by being yoked to Congress and President Obama. Democrats, Republicans and Obama are all viewed more unfavorably than favorably by Arkansas voters, Obama worst of all. 55 percent of those surveyed said they were less like to vote for someone who voted for the Affordable Care Act, as Mark Pryor did. Evidence of the benefits of that law is growing, but time runs short to turn opinion by 2014. Republican strategy is simple. Mark Pryor will
become a name synonymous with Barack Obama and Obamacare. What will Democrats do about Tom Cotton? Tear him down, too. His favorable rating is only 28-22 because so MAX few people, relatively speakBRANTLEY ing, know him well. But those maxbrantley@arktimes.com unfavorables are already fairly high for an unknown and they’ll go higher. Democrats have unveiled a website (meettomcotton.com) with a simple theme — Tom Cotton: Too Reckless for Arkansas. There’s much to work with. Cotton would turn Medicare into a voucher program, inevitably reducing benefits. He’d privatize Social Security. He voted against the bill to reduce the cost of student college loans, though he enjoyed government-backed loan help when he went to Harvard. He voted against disaster aid for hurricane victims. He’s voted repeatedly against the interests of women — in the military, in equal pay, in medical autonomy. He voted against the farm bill and wants to slash food stamps, heavily used in Arkansas. Then there’s Obamacare. Cotton would kill it. He’d kill it even though his paid political director, Rep. John Burris, was an architect of the “private option” version of Obamacare passed by the Arkansas legislature. Ending Obamacare would devastate the private option and leave hundreds of thousands of Arkansans suffering. The list is not an exaggeration or caricature of his record. It’s fair game for attack. Cotton really believes he can do more for Arkansas by seeing to it that the federal government does far less, particularly by attacking the president’s groundbreaking initiative to move the U.S. toward universal health care. But do I really want to hear about it for 14 months? The prospect puts me in mind of the John Prine song: Blow up your TV.