Playing the game

LITTLE ROCK — Let me tell you about athletic competition.

By that I mean the personally interactive kind, not some game played mostly between your ears-like golf, which is billiards on a large outdoor table.

It’s also croquet without the fun of knocking the other guy’s ball for a distant loop.

Anyway, what I want to tell you is that directly interactive athletic competition is all about match-ups.

You might be a better tennis player than I am, a consistent vanquisher of me.

But I might play a closer match than you against a third guy who is better than both of us.

You and I would match up one way; he and I another; you and he,yet another.

So the other day I got invited over to state Democratic Party headquarters so that Will Bond, the lawyer and former state representative and now party chairman, could tell me about match-ups. I mean political ones, and, specifically, state legislative ones.

Bond, a personable and formidable young man, has just about had it with Republicans’ super-spin that they are going to take over one or both of the legislative chambers because of the ever-reddening of the state generally.

He also has about had it with certain commentators regurgitating this Republican super-spin, though I cannot imagine who he means.

The fact is, Bond said, that local legislative races are all about the individual match-up, each unique to its own place and to the style and substance of its combatants.

For that matter, he said, Arkansas is famously eccentric in its politics. It might go Republican on one thing-say, Congress-but not on an another-say, the state Legislature.

When all is said and done, Bond said, the Democrats won’t lose ground from their 54-46 House advantage and their 20-15 Senate advantage, and might even gain in both places.

The “tsunami,” he said, was 2010 when, indeed, an “R” could win merely by being an “R.”

But Democrats survived that legislatively, and now things are normalizing, at least in a new two-party way, he said. That puts the focus back on these match-ups he professes to be so happy about.

He says Republicans blew it in Columbia County and surrounding areas, which are heavily Republican, by fielding no candidate against Democrat Bruce Maloch for an open state Senate seat.

Then Bond started venturing around the big map in his office. He doesn’t think Jason Rapert is any cinch at all-or even a favorite-to beat the genuinely tough Linda Tyler for the state Senate in a Faulkner County race.

He describes Democratic Sen. Mike Fletcher’s district in Garland, Hot Spring and Saline counties and wonders where Republicans get the idea that it’s good for them.

Bond has heard that Republicans think party-switcher Linda Collins-Smith of Pocahontas will take out Sen. David Wyatt of Batesville. So he shows you election returns in that area that render the assertion a tad dubious.

He points to the district from White County south along the Grand Prairie that Republicans say state Sen. Jonathan Dismang is certain to take for them against Rep. Tiffany Rogers, the Democrat.

Bond says this basically is Mike Beebe’s old Senate district. That would be Democrat Mike Beebe.

Bond hasn’t even gotten to the House, where he starts by saying Democrats will take out Loy Mauch in Hot Spring County and Jon Hubbard in Craighead County by letting the extremist positions of those two get contrasted with the logic and reason of their Democratic challengers.

In fact, that’s pretty much the coordinated Democratic legislative message.

I might paraphrase it very loosely in my own terminology this way: The other guys are dangerous and we’re not. They want to tear down government and they have every aptitude for the job. We want to make government work efficiently and we have every aptitude for that.

Or just this: They’re nuts and we’re not.

That’s my phrase, not theirs.

So now I’ve regurgitated both spins. Sometimes you just can’t know until you play the game and check the score.

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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.