That football spectacle Saturday in Little Rock provided more metaphors than enjoyment. I could scarcely keep up with the game for pondering the political subtext.
Consider: The game was played in an outdated facility more befitting a bygone era. It invoked an earlier time when the state's fan base was concentrated in Little Rock eastward.
In that era, the football team of the state's land-grant university, remotely located in the far opposite corner of the state, found it appropriate to play many of its home games in that facility in Little Rock.
That's a metaphor for the state's one-party Democratic political culture. That Democratic dominance is an outdated stadium, you might say. It's a Delta-based relic of a bygone era, you might also say.
Consider: That the University of Arkansas was still, in 2014, playing a home game--a home conference game--in this remote location ... that was a reflection of Arkansas' long-lingering peculiarity, its uniqueness among competing Southern states, where the practice of maintaining two home stadiums has long been abandoned.
That's a metaphor for Arkansas' stubborn adherence to a dominant Democratic political tradition extending well past the time when Democrats became all but extinct in Mississippi and Tennessee and Alabama and South Carolina, not to mention Texas and Oklahoma.
Consider: It is becoming obvious that the University of Arkansas is determined to phase out this anachronistic Little Rock game. Now the power is to the northwest. Now the practice is to consolidate all your dollars in one state-of-the-art campus facility enticing luxury-suite dwellers and recruits.
An existing contract will continue the Little Rock engagement once a year through 2018. That probably will be the end of it. And Saturday's spectacle probably was the last meaningful conference game ever to be played by the Razorbacks in War Memorial Stadium.
And that is a metaphor for what is likely to happen Nov. 4 when the state abandons the Democratic tradition wholesale, just as the Hogs are preparing to abandon the War Memorial tradition wholesale.
All of that is to say that Arkansas--in football, in politics, in culture, in life--is becoming more homogenized and less distinctive, more modern and less a relic, more regular and less special, more normal and less weird.
Arkansas is now so powerfully Republicanized that a GOP candidate needs only to defeat Barack Obama, who has a 30 percent approval rating in the state. A Democrat's only chance in today's Arkansas is to be lucky enough to draw a Republican opponent so weak or flawed that defeating even Obama becomes something of a chore.
That brings us to Leslie Rutledge.
She is the Republican nominee for attorney general who says as a mantra that she, if elected, will "push back" against the "overreach" of the Obama administration. It's unclear what that means. Federal supremacy is well-established, as an attorney ought to know. But it's good political-speak for today's Arkansas.
Yet Rutledge's campaign struggles.
She got stuck with a "do-not-rehire" tag when she left a staff attorney job in the state Human Services Department. She says she'll get to the bottom of that, by golly, after she becomes attorney general. That sounds like a clumsy threat.
But she could act right now. She could retrieve her file, confidently share her performance reviews and let all of us consider the information in the context of whether to promote her to be the state's chief lawyer. But she won't do that.
She says those were liberal Democrats out to get her at the Human Services Department.
Then there was the matter of the Blue Hog blogger's FOI request for Rutledge's emails on a public computer as a staff lawyer in Human Services. It turned out she had forwarded another's email that was written in black dialect and seemed to make fun of a family seeking state services.
Rutledge says forwarding an email is not the same as writing one, and that, anyway, some black people told her the dialect sounded "country." Left unexplained is the very basic question: Why forward it at all?
When governor, Mike Huckabee forced the resignation of an agency director for forwarding a racist email.
State Sen. Joyce Elliott of Little Rock, a leading member of the legislative black caucus, has written that Rutledge's action may not have been racist, but was clearly demeaning and unworthy of someone presuming to hold the office of attorney general where fair-minded judiciousness is needed.
At least Rutledge has debated her Democratic foe, state Rep. Nate Steel of Nashville.
Mark Martin, the Republican incumbent as secretary of state, arrogantly refused to debate his Democratic challenger, Susan Inman, last week on the Arkansas Educational Television Network. A consultant to his campaign tells me Martin instead had to tour the nuclear power plant in Russellville and speak to a civic club in that area.
He easily could have rescheduled both or proposed an alternative time and date to AETN. Yet he, alone among all statewide constitutional and congressional candidates, declined to deign to enter into dialogue with his political opponent.
His job as secretary of state is to mow the grass, dust the floor, keep important files and, as an election-services coordinator, serve the democratic process. He failed on that last one.
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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.
Editorial on 10/21/2014