Exit Tim Griffin

IF THERE has been a more maligned Arkansas politician in the last few years than Tim Griffin, the congressman from the Second District, then you’d have to . . . .

Whoa, check that, as they say in the Army. In the last few months a lot of nasty things have been said about Tom Cotton, too. He’s the congressman from the Fourth District who’s now running for the U.S. Senate. And now that Tim Griffin has decided not to run for re-election, Congressman and Captain Cotton can expect even more attacks from the same quarters that made Tim Griffin a favorite target.

Here’s an unsolicited tip for young Mr. Cotton: a suit of armor, complete with the helmet, and maybe some chain mail underneath. Tim Griffin may have a used one.

As for Mr. Griffin, he isn’t planning to stay U.S.

representative from the Second District of Arkansas for much longer. You see, he’s a lieutenant colonel in the Reserves, a veteran of the war in Iraq, a former interim U.S. attorney, a former aide to a president of the United States, and-if you listen to the more excitable types on the larboard side of Arkansas politics-the worst thing ever.

Here is but a sampling of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s obsession with the Hon. Tim Griffin. These nuggets were kindly sent to our email box just in the last few weeks:

-Congressman Griffin was responsible for the government shutdown. No, really. After the mess was over, one of the emails from the DCCC was headlined: “Congressman Griffin’s $24 billion shutdown finally ends.” Huh? How a single U.S. representative in that office for all of one and a half terms-and a congressman who voted to end the shutdown at that-could acquire the power to shut down the whole government of the United States of America is . . . remarkable. Or would be, if it were remotely true. But the DCCC can be, uh, remarkably frugal with its facts, not that it necessarily has any.

-Tim Griffin wanted to throw senior citizens under the bus. If you believe the DCCC’s spinmeisters.

-The congressman was responsible for turning away cancer patients at hospital doors, throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work, and asking Steve Spurrier to run up the score against the Hogs a few weeks ago. (Okay, that last one we made up, but only because the writers at the DCCC didn’t make it up first.) ALL OF that jabber wound up in our in-box just since the first of the month. Say what you will about all these attacks, nobody said Tim Griffin was lazy. Why, he’s a one-man wrecking crew bound and determined to destroy the United States of America and all we hold dear. By himself. Not since Old Ned has anyone had more fearsome things said about him. Except ol’ George W. Bush maybe. (Miss him yet?)

Someone named Vince Insalaco, who is identified in dispatches as chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, was quoted as saying the real reason Tim Griffin wasn’t running for another term in Congress was that he “saw the writing on the wall and figured out that Arkansans were going to hold him accountable for the dysfunction in Washington.”

Uh huh. What a load of . . . politics. It seems this Mr. Insalaco couldn’t hold his partisan reflexes and usual diatribes in check even though their target was no longer running for re-election. Bad feelings just get to be a habit with some folks. A bad habit.

And all this trash talk was just from the folks who disagree with Tim Griffin’s politics. Those who agree with him most of the time can be pretty nasty too. A right-wing group, Americans for Limited Government, went after him when he dared to vote (with hundreds of his colleagues) to re-open the government of the United States. ALG’s conclusion in this case: Congressman Griffin “now owns Obamacare just as much as if it had been a vote to adopt it in the first place.” That’s a bit of a stretch. Call it a Texarkana-to-Memphis stretch.

So now Tim Griffin has decided he’s finished with Congress. He announced Monday that he won’t seek a third term, raising the question: How in the world did he put up with all this nonsense this long? How could anybody? As much trouble as we ourselves have given politicians over the years, we’re still grateful and amazed that they’re willing to hold public office-a dubious honor we’d never have the stomach for.

As if having to be a congressman isn’t burden enough, especially with the stature congressmen have today, or rather the lack thereof, with their last approval rating about to enter the minus numbers, there’s that commute to Washington every week Congress is in session and earning the country’s contempt. Asking a young family man to go off and leave his family for most of the week, not to mention Arkansas in October, is asking way too much. It meets the Constitution’s definition of cruel and unusual punishment by every standard. Most of all, it threatens a man’s sense of place.

We once had a well-meaning Yankee, bless his heart, ask us in all apparent seriousness what was meant by this “sense of place” he kept reading about in reviews of Southern writers. What do you say? According to popular legend, Louis Armstrong, ol’ Satchmo himself, was supposed to have said that, if you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know. The same applies to a sense of place.

Or as Walker Percy had his archetypical young Southerner, Binx Bolling, say in The Moviegoer, if you think a man can “close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street,” well, you just don’t understand. And no amount of carrying on about a sense of place is going to get you to understand. It’s just something you get in your blood about home and the South, as ineradicable as the sound of crickets and dark laughter in the night. Something about these fecund and ever forgiving latitudes becomes part of us. And if it has to be explained to you, well, you’ll never understand it.

To ask a man to give all that up four days a week, and then have to toady and pretend and flatter and pander and set his mouth just right, which is what being in politics too often demands, is to demand too damnably much.

NOW WE arrive at the point when the commentariat grouses about how politics these days is so bitter that few good people want to get involved, yadda, yadda. As if politics has ever been bean bag. The history books note that a vice president of the United States once shot and killed a former secretary of the Treasury. (And the best the country ever had, too.) That was 209 years ago.

At one point American politics got sufficiently bitter that the states even went to war with one another. The bitterness may start with gibberish from outfits like the DCCC and ALG and all their true-believing counterparts, but where it leads no one can be sure. Once upon a time, circa 1861-65, the results were a bloody national tragedy.

Good people do still get involved in politics. Thank goodness. Just look at the story in Tuesday’s paper about Tim Griffin’s decision. Or any picture of him with his wife and kids. And you’ll understand why he made it. Happily, folks are already preparing to succeed him. Good folks. May they keep it civil, or at least try.

Today let’s just tell Tim Griffin how much the state appreciates his service. He says he’s stepping down to spend more time with his family. And unlike other politicians who may use that phrase when they’re in a tight, Tim Griffin wasn’t. He remained popular after winning two terms by comfortable margins. He just has his priorities in the right order: family first. It’s clear a lot of us underestimated the man. Who knew he had that much sense?