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Midterm Roundup: Things Are Getting Weird In New Hampshire

Midterm Roundup: Things Are Getting Weird In New Hampshire

Here are some interesting stories on the midterm campaigns that you may have missed on Thursday, October 30:

• Republican Scott Brown has not hesitated to utilize the politics of fear in his attempt to unseat Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), but even by his standards, this is a bit ridiculous. During an interview with NH1, Brown insisted that the government needs to seal off the border because immigrants are “coming through” carrying “the whooping cough and polio and other types of potential diseases.” For the record, polio has been eradicated in the Western Hemisphere. Brown and Shaheen will meet for their final debate on Thursday night; Shaheen holds a 2 percent lead in the Real Clear Politics poll average.

• Meanwhile, another new poll suggests that New Hampshire’s gubernatorial race could be much closer than previously anticipated. An American Research Group survey released Thursday finds Democratic governor Maggie Hassan barely leading Republican challenger Walt Havenstein, 48 to 46 percent. It comes just days after a New England College poll surprisingly showed the race tied. Every other public poll has found Hassan with a comfortable lead, and she still holds a 6.6 percent edge in the poll average.

• Democratic Senator Kay Hagan is maintaining her narrow lead over Republican Thom Tillis, according to two new polls of North Carolina’s Senate race. Rasmussen Reports finds Hagan ahead 47 to 46 percent, well within the margin of error. But an Elon University poll shows Hagan with a statistically significant 4 percent edge. Hagan is up by just 1.6 percent in the poll average.

• Two new polls of Arkansas’ Senate race find Republican Rep. Tom Cotton pulling away from incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor. Rasmussen Reports has Cotton leading 51 to 44 percent, while The Arkansas Poll shows Cotton with a massive 13 percent edge. Other polls have shown a tighter race, but Cotton is a clear favorite going into Election Day; he leads by 7 percent in the poll average.

• A new Quinnipiac poll of Colorado’s Senate race shows Republican Rep. Cory Gardner opening up a 7-point lead over Democratic senator Mark Udall, marking his biggest advantage of the campaign. But a Public Policy Polling survey conducted for the League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund finds the candidates deadlocked at 48 percent, and many Democrats and pundits still insist that polls are systematically undercounting Udall’s support. Gardner has to be considered the favorite headed intoElection Day, but Udall cannot be counted out yet.

Photo: Roger H. Goun via Flickr

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For Mark Pryor, This Is Not His Father’s Arkansas

For Mark Pryor, This Is Not His Father’s Arkansas

By Stuart Rothenberg, CQ Roll Call (MCT)

WASHINGTON — I have been thinking for months about how politics has changed over the past decade, but those changes struck home in a very obvious way while I was reading a recent Washington Post article written by the very able Philip Rucker.

“Senator’s parents hit trail to preserve Ark. dynasty” was a front page piece that noted the efforts of former governor and former senator David Pryor and his wife, Barbara, to help their son, Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, win re-election next month.

David Pryor won three races for Congress, two elections for governor and three Senate contests (losing only a Senate primary in 1972) between 1966 and 1990. He rarely had a tough race, and he was held in high regard by many Arkansans, even those who didn’t vote for him.

Rucker’s piece shows that many greeted the former governor warmly, but it also demonstrates how politics has evolved, and how that change has altered the way voters evaluate candidates for Congress.

“We’re campaigning for Mark because everybody likes mamas and daddies,” said the senator’s mother to one voter, according to Rucker.

Well, yes, people understand why parents support their children, and nobody is going to blame the vulnerable senator or his parents for stumping for him. But David and Barbara Pryor aren’t likely to get many votes for their son. Not this year, at least.

Partisanship and ideology are linked more closely now than they were 50 or 60 years ago. Back then, the two parties didn’t stand for opposing ideologies. They each included liberal, moderate and conservative members of Congress and attracted voters from across the ideological spectrum.

Democratic voters sent liberals like Hubert Humphrey, conservatives like Richard Russell and, somewhat later, moderates like David Pryor and Sam Nunn to the Senate. Republicans could dispatch conservatives Barry Goldwater and Karl Mundt to Capitol Hill at the same time that other Republicans were sending moderates and liberals like Chuck Percy and John Lindsay.

That’s no longer the case, and it’s a large part of the reason why a gentleman like David Pryor, who had an impressive political career, has such little influence on Arkansas voters these days.

The increased importance of ideology also has affected campaigning.

A couple of months ago, I received an email from an old friend who also happens to be one of the best reporters, and most astute political observers, on this or any planet. He noted repeatedly what a bad candidate Arkansas Republican Rep. Tom Cotton is. Others also have remarked that Pryor is great at pressing the flesh, while Cotton clearly lacks that skill.

Cotton, who is a narrow but clear favorite against Mark Pryor next month, is not a back-slapping, joke-telling good old boy. He is a serious, Harvard and Harvard Law School-educated Iraq veteran who served with the 101st Airborne.

But while there are times and places when a hearty handshake, a good old boy slap on the back and a couple of anecdotes and jokes still can be decisive, those skills don’t necessarily matter as much now as they once did. (Personality can still matter, of course, as Republican Senate challenger Cory Gardner of Colorado has demonstrated. But that’s better left for another column.)

I never bought into the criticism of Cotton, which spread throughout the political circles of D.C., because I figured his resume — including his party and his opposition to President Barack Obama — far outweighed his stylistic weakness this cycle.

There was a time, of course, when Deep South Democratic senators like Fritz Hollings or Howell Heflin used their flair for storytelling and populism to win re-election. But they too would have electoral trouble if they had to defend votes for Obamacare.

Arkansas voters now see the candidates through the prisms of partisanship and ideology, and that is very bad news for a moderate Democrat in Arkansas and with Obama in the White House. Of course, Mark Pryor would be in much better shape politically this year if an unpopular George W. Bush were still in the Oval Office rather than an unpopular liberal Democrat.

You don’t think party matters that much? Why don’t you ask former Iowa GOP Rep. Jim Leach, former Maryland GOP Rep. Connie Morella or former Connecticut Republican Rep. Chris Shays? Or maybe you want to talk about it with former Idaho Democratic Rep. Walter Minnick or former Texas Democratic Reps. Charlie Stenholm or Chet Edwards.

All of those former members were liked back home, thoughtful and well-connected to their district’s voters, and all lost because they were members of the wrong political party and because their national party’s ideology trumped their individual political brands.

I am not arguing that a good family name has no value. Being a Kennedy in New England, a Bush in Texas or a Pryor in Arkansas undoubtedly is an asset, sometimes a huge one.

Florida’s 2nd District, where Democratic challenger Gwen Graham is running, is so evenly divided that her father’s reputation may help her fall over the finish line slightly ahead of incumbent Republican Rep. Steve Southerland II. (For now, that race is too close to call.)

But when a state or congressional district has switched from blue to red or red to blue, a pleasing personality, a firm handshake, a slap on the back, a good family name and even a record of good constituency service and political moderation usually isn’t enough to save a beleaguered incumbent in a bad year.

I could be wrong, of course, but at least that’s where I’ve been putting my money since December, when we moved this race to tilting toward Cotton.

Screenshot: Mark Pryor/YouTube

Upside-Down Tea Party Dogma in Arkansas

Upside-Down Tea Party Dogma in Arkansas

When we moved to our Arkansas cattle farm, a friend lent us a book titled A Straw in the Sun. Published in 1945, Charlie Mae Simon’s beautifully written memoir of homesteading here in Perry County, Arkansas during the 1930s was long out of print—maybe because the hardscrabble life it depicts is too recent for nostalgia.

Like much of the rural South before World War II, Perry County was essentially the Third World. So was Yell County, immediately to the west, home of U.S. Senate candidate Tom Cotton. Except for a lot of wasteful government spending he affects to deplore, it would still be.

Cotton’s campaign against Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Pryor reflects everything upside-down about Tea Party dogma and the tycoons who fund it—a local story with national implications.

Originally featured as New Yorker essays, Simon’s book wasn’t intended as social protest. Even so, many forget that millions of Americans lived as subsistence-level peasant farmers within living memory.

Simon and her neighbors grew their own food and slaughtered their own hogs; they cut firewood, dug wells, built outhouses, made candles and fermented corn liquor. Electricity and telephones weren’t available; cash commerce all but non-existent. To file her essays, Simon walked hours to the general store or hitched rides on mule-drawn wagons along dirt roads that became impassible in wet weather. The simple life proved terribly complicated.

During the same period, writes historian S. Charles Bolton in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, roughly 1/3 of black and 1/5 of rural white Arkansans emigrated to places like Chicago or Los Angeles. Others found work in town. Today, large parts of Perry and Yell counties are in the Ouachita National Forest. They had more residents then than now.

But here’s the thing: Contrary to Tea Party fantasies, it wasn’t plucky private entrepreneurs that paved the roads, strung the wire, saved grandpa from penury and made organized commerce across the rural South possible. It was federal and state investment.

Even today, such prosperity as Yell County enjoys—it’s the 64th wealthiest of Arkansas’s 75 counties—derives from timber cutting and the proximity of three scenic lakes built and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Not to mention, of course, agricultural price supports from the 2014 Farm Bill that Rep. Cotton voted against.

But enough history. There’s plenty of strictly contemporary reality that self-styled “conservatives” also ignore. In TV commercials, Cotton depicts himself as the dutiful son of a “cattle rancher” who taught him farmers can’t spend money they don’t have.

Cotton’s father does run a small cattle farm near Dardanelle. However, it’s also a fact that Len Cotton retired as District Supervisor of the Arkansas Health Department after a 37-year career. The senior Cotton has also served on the Arkansas Veterans Commission, the Tri-County Regional Water Board, etc.

The candidate’s mother Avis taught in public schools for 40 years. She retired in 2012 as principal of the Dardanelle middle school. Career government bureaucrats, both, bless their public-spirited hearts.

So I’m guessing Len Cotton raises cattle for the same reasons I do: because it’s an absorbing hobby with considerable tax advantages.

Meanwhile, the thing about the Farm Bill that urban liberals often don’t get, and that a poser like Tom Cotton’s being disingenuous about, is this that it’s damn near impossible to farm without risking money you don’t have.

The largest recipient of agricultural subsidies in Arkansas is Riceland Rice—a member-owned co-op representing 5,800 farmers.

Farmers who have to pay for seeds, fertilizer, and diesel fuel to pump water; also to finance tractors and combines more costly than the land. Farmers who borrow every spring in the hope of turning a profit in the fall. And who risk losing the entire crop to pests, floods, drought, tornadoes, to cheap soybeans from Brazil, etc. If there’s fraud and waste, cut it out. However, it’s in the national interest to keep agriculture strong.

But let’s head back to town, shall we? One of the fastest growing GOP strongholds in Arkansas is the college town of Conway, just across the Arkansas River. Tom Cotton’s sure to do well there.

And why does Conway prosper? Basically, government largesse. Located along Interstate 40, it’s the home of the University of Central Arkansas, a growing state school. It’s got a brand-new, federally-funded airport, two private colleges supported by state scholarships funded by the Arkansas Lottery, and an excellent non-profit hospital (Medicare, Medicaid), etc.

The city’s biggest private employers are Internet-oriented Acxiom and Hewlett Packard. (Pentagon researchers created the Internet.) Furthermore, everybody in Conway receives electricity, water, sewage, cable TV, Internet and telephone service from the Conway Corporation—a city-owned co-op begun in the 1920s, as efficient an example of municipal socialism as you’ll find this side of Stockholm, Sweden.

Dogma notwithstanding, all successful modern economies are mixed economies.

No politician who tells you differently is your friend.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Tom Cotton’s Bumbling Campaign Just Might Win

Tom Cotton’s Bumbling Campaign Just Might Win

Tell your Mama

Tell your Paw,

I’m gonna send you back to Arkansas

— Ray Charles

The remarkable thing is that an aloof, bookish fellow like Tom Cotton is running for the U.S. Senate anywhere, much less in darkest Arkansas.

It’s a place Cotton left behind ASAP — first for Harvard, ultimately for Washington right-wing “think tanks” — a place of small cities, country towns, and friendly, talkative people given to down-home retail politics. A people historically resentful of condescending outsiders and arguably less easily bamboozled by tycoon-funded TV commercials than Americans who’ve never had a politician like Bill Clinton or Gov. Mike Beebe ask about their mama by name.

Cotton either can’t do that, or he won’t. Although his campaign skills have reportedly improved, he’s often struck observers as an outsider at his own campaign events — standing on the sidelines, making scant eye contact and smiling infrequently. Cotton’s speeches list ideological talking points in a monotone. People have told reporters he’s introduced himself to the same person twice at one event.

By ordinary Arkansas standards, Cotton would appear to have committed several fatal political blunders: He questioned his Democratic opponent Senator Mark Pryor’s religious faith in a broadcast interview. Famously pious to the point of dullness, Pryor asked for an apology he never got.

With every other statewide political candidate attending the annual Bradley “Pink Tomato Festival,” Cotton was a no-show. Instead, he graced a Koch Brothers-financed event at a luxury hotel in California — receiving applause for his “courage” in voting against the 2014 Farm Bill.

After a tornado devastated Mayflower and Vilonia, AR last spring, President Obama visited the disaster site to commiserate and promise help. Mark Pryor, too. Possibly wary of questions about his votes against Hurricane Sandy relief, Cotton stayed away.

“I don’t think Arkansas needs to bail out the Northeast,” he’d explained. Cotton also voted against funding FEMA — the Federal Emergency Management Administration. He said the nation couldn’t afford it.

Today, there’s a big Tom Cotton billboard standing amid the rubble along Interstate 40 in Mayflower midway between Little Rock and Conway.

Cotton voted against funding for Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the nationally known pediatric teaching wing of the University of Arkansas Medical School. Stung by criticism, he alibied that his vote hadn’t cost the hospital a dime. Because his side lost, the candidate neglected to mention.

Normally, any two of these blunders — and there are more — would doom even a personable candidate. But Cotton isn’t running against Sen. Mark Pryor, a cautiously moderate Democrat and the son of the universally popular former governor and U.S. Senator David Pryor. (Disclaimer: my wife worked on Pryor’s gubernatorial staff.)

Instead Cotton is running against Barack Obama. Not the real President Obama so much as the Kenyan Usurper of Tea Party and Club for Growth fame, an alien presence whose wild overspending threatens fiscal ruin. If, as polls show, 54 percent of Americans incorrectly believe that the yearly federal budget deficit has mushroomed since Obama took office in 2009, the proportion of misinformed Arkansans is doubtless higher.

In reality, contrary to Cotton’s warnings of fiscal apocalypse, the Obama administration has cut the yearly deficit by more than half. But perishingly few Arkansans understand that. It’s become a Fox News demographic.

Dislike of President Obama has grown almost cultlike among white Arkansas voters. Although everybody’s heartily sick of the unending barrage of outside-funded TV ads for both candidates, Cotton’s relentlessly push one theme: A vote for Mark Pryor is a vote for Barack Obama.

And yet the race remains extremely close.

Now comes Atlantic Monthly’s Molly Ball with a profile centered upon the 37-year-old Cotton’s senior thesis at Harvard, which the proud candidate can evidently still recite word for word. Declaiming upon the Federalist Papers, Cotton expressed a young man’s egocentric contempt for the yokels back home:

“Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes [sic] most men,” Cotton wrote, “whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office. Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection since politics is a dirty business.”

Quite so. For example, the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Arkansas currently stars in a TV ad explaining away an inconvenient vote. “President Obama,” Cotton alibis, “hijacked the farm bill (and) turned it into a food stamp bill.” He also claims the bill added “billions in spending.”

Both claims are categorically false. The Farm Bill and food stamp budget have been linked since 1973, before Tom Cotton was born. Furthermore, the 2014 Farm Bill that passed despite his no vote cut $8.7 billion from projected spending.

It’s as brazen a political falsehood as one can imagine.

Meanwhile, back home in Yell County, one of the poorest in Arkansas, 13 percent of the population receives food stamp assistance, including 25 percent of the children. (Yell County is roughly 1 percent African-American.)

Politics can be a dirty business, alright.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

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