Scoring shutdown politics

In Arkansas we confront only the nation’s most intense U.S. Senate race next year.

Our race could decide majority status. It is close by any assessment.

Classically, it pits a consummately moderate Southern Democratic incumbent, Mark Pryor, against a consummately zealous conservative insurgent seeking to advance from Congress, Tom Cotton.

Thus it covers the two prevailing political blocs in Arkansas-those who think our elected officials ought to work together pragmatically and incrementally, and those who think we ought to blow up the government because Barack Obama has ruined it.

Naturally, then, the political implications of this epic shutdown and debt-limit debacle are relevant, perhaps profound.

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Even before the U.S. House of Representatives had approved the negotiated settlement Wednesday evening, the Senate Majority PAC, the political action committee for which Harry Reid raises money, was on television in Arkansas with a commercial blaming “reckless” Cotton for the shutdown.

The ad used a snippet of Cotton in his own voice saying months ago on right-wing radio, where he spends entirely too much time, that “we have to be prepared” to shut down the government to resist Obamacare.

The ad certainly was quick. It certainly was opportunistic. It even was exploitative.

It also was fair, accurate, true and relevant in every word.

If you are scoring the politics of the shutdown fiasco at home, then you should give 10 points to Pryor for reasonably opposing the nonsensical shutdown in the first place.

Then you should give him 10 more points for joining a bipartisan Gang of 14 centrist senators working with Maine Republican Susan Collins to fashion a deal to reopen the government and extend the debt limit.

Their talks became the framework for the decisive arrangement between Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

They gave Reid six areas of agreement. He and McConnell settled on four of them, leaving out a delay in the medical-device tax and temporary flexibility for some agencies dealing with sequestration cuts.

Then you should assign a 20-point debit to Cotton for being part of the irrational Tea Party element of House Republicans-the kamikaze caucus-that forced the shutdown on the inane notion that government’s operation itself should be negotiated in the course of fighting a bill that had passed fair and square.

You should give no points back to Cotton for voting correctly Wednesday night in favor of the final deal, a generosity that one of his local admirers pressed on me Thursday morning.

He and his kamikaze colleagues could have cast the same vote 16 days before and saved all the nonsense.

It’s quite simple in this case: The incumbent senator in this epic race was part of the solution. The young congressman challenging him was part of the problem.

Period. End of sentence. End of paragraph.

But not end of story.

Now, on the other hand, beware of one truism: All of that could change, perhaps as profoundly, because the dynamic is likely soon to change.

If the kamikaze pilots of Cotton’s ilk have learned anything-and surely they have-it’s that their recent tactic was at best pointless and at worst fatal.

If they can take insane tactics out of their playbook, then they ought to be able to turn their pent-up energy to a smarter three-track initiative.

One track is to argue positively and effectively for reduced spending to lower the deficit and the rate of debt compilation, because decisive independent voters are with them on that.

The second is to isolate today’s happy winners, congressional Democrats, if those Democrats insist-as I fear they will-on weakening or undoing the sequestration spending cuts that actually have led to deficit reductions over the last year.

The third is to let Obamacare be Obamacare. That is to let it fail on its own merit, if you think that’s what it will do, in which case the politics would justifiably accrue to the benefit of Republicans.

The tactic of fighting the Affordable Care Act irrationally and desperately in advance of its full effectiveness has led to wide and credible suspicion that Republicans don’t fear the health reform’s failure, but its popular success.

Pryor, ever the conciliatory moderate and pragmatist, tells me he is mildly confident that an actual new compromise budget can be achieved by the Dec. 13 deadline for issuance of a conference report set by Wednesday’s negotiated settlement.

I can’t say which party would win that politically. I can only say that the American people would win for sure.

I also know that we should have learned one clear lesson: Footing is surer the farther from the cliff.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline. com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.