Let us begin, alas, with a clarification and correction.
In this space exactly one week ago today, I predicted that former North Little Rock Mayor Patrick Henry Hays would soon pay a price for his effective, vote-winning and positive television advertising in his Democratic bid for Congress in the 2nd District.
I foresaw that Hays would be attacked by the National Republican Congressional Committee on some trumped-up charge that he was a liberal clone of that horrid Barack Obama.
The clarification is that what I predicted happened sooner than I thought, within five days of the column's publication.
The correction is that the Republican committee didn't air the attack on Hays as a dreaded Obama-ist. The Republican nominee himself, French Hill, a millionaire former banker, apparently became panicked. He chose to dare not wait for his national benefactors.
He leveled the attack in his own television commercial.
He did so quite oddly. Speaking into the camera, Hill began by saying Hays had been attacking him falsely.
That's certainly not so of Hays' television spots, which have been uniformly and engagingly positive in their narrative depiction of an everyman mayor talking about the good he did in 24 years leading his city.
So I asked a Hill campaign spokesman what Hill was talking about in his reference to Hays' false negative attacks.
The best the spokesman could do was cite that occasion when Hays signed a pledge to take no congressional perks and sent some of his people over to Hill's headquarters with video cameras to see if Hill would sign a blow-up of the pledge. Hill wasn't there.
The Hill spokesman also cited pages of opposition research against Hill that had been posted online.
In the first example, signing a goofy pledge and going to your opponent's headquarters with a placard is not a false negative attack. It's a hollow political stunt.
In the second example, the Hays' campaign says it hasn't published any such opposition research.
What the Hill campaign was talking about was a hundred pages of negative research on Hill from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, not Hays. And law provides that those entities--the DCCC and Hays' campaign--may not coordinate.
A party's posting of opposition research is not a direct attack from candidate against candidate. It is a cynical smoke signal to outside groups about what these outside groups might exploit--on a wholly uncoordinated basis, of course, wink-wink.
Not all malarkey is a false negative attack, you see. Sometimes malarkey is just malarkey.
Hill goes on in his ad to say that Hays gave himself repeated pay raises and took junkets.
What is true is that, over 24 years, the North Little Rock City Council gave Hays raises that he didn't specifically request but which were in line with raises he was recommending for staff. Hays' salary was on a par with, even a little less than, mayors of similarly sized cities in the state.
As for junkets, I may as well put this out there: By the sheer longevity of his 24 years as mayor, Hays rose to the chairmanship of a municipal officials' group--the Local Governments for Sustainability board of the American division of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.
In fact, Hays' staying power got him to the presidency of the USA division of ICLEI.
Now you must understand that there are paranoid right-wing extremists out there who allege that Hays, by working with a group that is international in nature and concerned about environmental sustainability, was a key cog in a United Nations conspiracy to take over our communities and destroy our way of life by forcing us out of gasoline-powered cars and into group transportation and onto bicycles.
One night I heard a Jeannie Burlsworth of something called Secure Arkansas tell a receptive Faulkner County Tea Party that Hays and Gov. Mike Beebe were the chief Arkansas-based conspirators in this international plot.
I do not at this point predict that Hill will become so panicked by Hays' positivity that he loses sanity and slings that charge.
But Hill does say in this new commercial that Hays made trips to Washington as mayor to help impose the Obama agenda.
Of course mayors of all persuasions have been known to go to Washington on local-related business not necessarily entailing conspiring with an unpopular president to try to help people with their health care.
Finally, I should say that the closest Hays has come to a personal attack on Hill is saying he finds Hill's statements on raising the minimum wage in Arkansas to be confusing.
The media apparently also find Hill's pronouncements on the minimum wage confusing, having reported them entirely differently.
As best I can determine, Hill once was against raising the minimum wage but now is for it so long as he can be assured raising the wage won't cost jobs--an assurance he is seeking to determine by his "due diligence," which he apparently has not yet wrapped up.
How gauche for Patrick Henry Hays to call that confusing.
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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 09/25/2014