EDITORIALS

The other Tom Cotton

You might call this one Darth Vader

— DON’T BE fooled by that old country-boy smile. Or that outstanding résumé. Or the landslide victory Tom Cotton scored in the GOP primary in the state’s Fourth Congressional District last Tuesday. That’s all just a clever disguise. Forget the Bronze Star, the Harvard degrees and such. The man is the devil. He hides his red PJs and pitchfork at home in Dardanelle. Okay, maybe not the devil, but a devil. More on the order of Darth Vader. Or maybe Freddy Krueger.

That’s the latest hue-and-cry from the spokesflacks at Democratic Party headquarters. The PR types running things there couldn’t even wait 24 hours before sending out their first smear. You’d think they might have paused for a day before firing their first barrage. Just to take a breath or maybe let the results from the primaries sink in. But that’s so yesterday, even yesteryear.

Back in a slower time, the loyal opposition might send out a fax-remember them?-the morning after a primary saying something along the lines of Congratulations, we look forward to a spirited debate in the coming months, a good turnout in the general election, and may the best man/woman win . . . .

But that was another time, another whole era, long before the age of James Carville and Lee Atwater, when op research and robocalls and general bad manners set in like kudzu. Or maybe just rot.

To get down to rude specifics, the latest dispatch from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee arrived just after the last returns in Tuesday’s primaries did. Here’s the subject line and, as Dave Barry used to say, WE ARE NOT MAKING THIS UP:

Tom Cotton and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad agenda

What, not sickening and bloodcurdling agenda, too? Where are these people’s synonym-finders? What a pity Maurice Sendak is no longer with us to illustrate this e-broadside in his best In the Night Kitchen style. Long Tall Tom could appear as one of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad monsters with bad manners and breath to match. A sight sure to terrify small children and yellow-dogs.

THIS EMAIL mentions Tom Cotton by name four times in just its three-paragraph introduction, each time referring to him as “Washington insider Tom Cotton.” Which is a strange honorific for a sixth-generation Arkie born in Dardanelle in Yell County, just like Mattie Ross and with much the same true grit. The man did clerk for a U.S. appellate court after Harvard. (Oh, the shame!) Which may be enough these days to qualify somebody as a Washington insider. That wouldn’t surprise us, for the bar has been set mighty low these days. You fly into DCA, take a cab for lunch with a congressional subaide at the Palm, and you’re a Washington insider before you hop on the red-eye for the flight back home.

One of the first low blows from the DCCC’s perpetually outraged spinners was that Mr./Capt. Cotton wants “massive” cuts in Medicare. Funny, that. Because Tom Cotton says he will try to save Medicare. Along with Medicaid and Social Security. And the best way to do that is to get the country’s books in the black (at last!) so the U.S. government stays solvent. Because if it goes broke, so does every social program it runs, often enough into the ground.

For his part, Tom Cotton says he supports either the Paul Ryan plan or something called the Republican Study Committee plan. Both aim to save Medicare through choice-and-competition. So that Medicare will still be around for the next generation, and the generation after that. It’s the folks running Medicare now, as he notes, who are the ones killing it. Not to mention Medicaid, which is about to throw many a state, including Arkansas, into arrears.

If we the people want to prop up these important-indeed, vital-government programs, we need to make sure they don’t crash under their own fiscal weight in the not-so-distant future. It’s estimated that by 2024 Medicare won’t be able to pay full benefits-not if it continues on its current Titanic-like fiscal course. Or maybe even sooner, depending on which study you read/expert you talk to.

Naturally enough, when you talk this way, that is, realistically, you’ll be accused of throwing grandma under the bus-just after you’ve thrown the grandkids out the window. That’s good old Democratic Talking Point No. 53, and it used to work like a political charm. Till the voting public caught on sometime circa 2010.

It’s too much to expect that the agitprop office at Democratic national headquarters would actually propose an answer to fixing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. That would be responsible. It’s so much easier to pretend there’s no looming debt problem and, if there is, why, we can just print some more money.

Why worry? The Greeks don’t. And you can see how well that’s working out. For the whole, worried Eurozone. Every time we look around, the Europeans are holding another summit to fix their ever bigger crisis. Naturally it doesn’t. Emptytalk never does. Which brings us back to the Democrats’ party line. Namely, ignore the problem and it’ll go away. Tom Cotton doesn’t believe that. Would any sensible citizen?

As for the insensible ones, a preview of what awaits if we continue to ignore Medicare’s declining balances is provided by another U.S. government pension plan, the one run by the Northern Mariana U.S. Commonwealth. That plan offered lavish benefits of every kind-till it filed for bankruptcy. Now it’s at the center of a legal and fiscal fight. The price of ignoring the debt problem can be kind of high.

THIS EMAIL also accuses Tom Cotton-sorry, that’s Washington Insider Tom Cotton-of wanting to raise the retirement age.As if that were something to condemn, instead of the kind of prudent precaution that could save all of us, especially future generations, a lot of fiscal pain.

’Most every politician who wants to keep his job, but we repeat ourselves, and who really wants to save Social Security, will tell you that the retirement age needs to be raised for future pensioners. N.B. Nobody responsible is saying 60-year-olds need to change all their retirement plans. But ratcheting up the retirement age to 67 would affect only workers who are now, say, only in their 20s or 30s. And if American longevity continues to improve-thank you, much abused American health care system-the retirement age could realistically be raised to 68 or even 70.

Any politician who would dare suggest raising the retirement age for those near retirement is . . . well, there are no politicians who suggest that. Except of course in the fevered imaginations of Democratic spinmeisters who pull out the They’re Going to Take Away Your Medicare card every election year. The way to win elections is simple, they must believe: Scare enough old folks.

Tom Cotton had to know he’d face this kind of thing soon enough. But he may not have known the polls would have barely closed in the primaries before the national Democratic spin machine went into high gear. (It seems to have only two settings: Hysterical and More So.)

Maybe there should be a post primary cool-down period in which both parties would give it a week before cranking up their general election campaigns. No formal rule to that effect, just an unstated understanding among ladies and gentlemen. It used to be called good sportsmanship, or maybe just good manners. No nasty emails, wild accusations or questionable assumptions for just one (1) week after the primaries are concluded. Would that be too much to ask?

Of course it would. It would be unspeakably civilized in this day and ever crasser age.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 05/29/2012

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