The superficial campaign

Patrick Henry Hays transformed from Andy Griffith to Hannibal Lecter in an instant.

One minute he was giving Opie an ice cream cone. The next he was dining on French Hill with a nice chianti and some fava beans.


The ink wasn't dry Thursday morning on my second column praising the former North Little Rock mayor's effectively positive campaign for Congress in the 2nd District. Suddenly Hays unveiled a television commercial trying to smear Hill, his Republican opponent, with Martha Shoffner.

Hays did it because his political calculation--and that of his professional people--was that he had to do it.

The other guy started it, you see. Any familiarity of that with the culture of the playground is ... fair enough.

Hill had gone negative on Hays, accusing him of being negative already when he hadn't been.

And news had just come in that Karl Rove's super-PAC Crossroads had bought $1.6 million worth of advertising for this race, no doubt to assault Hays in Hill's behalf--as some kind of Barack Obama-loving tax-and-spender, surely--over the next few weeks.

Rove doesn't come to a race to improve it. He comes in to destroy a Democrat for a Republican.

"You can't just take it in the chin," said David Furr, Hays' campaign manager.

So I wondered: Why wouldn't Hays simply avail himself of the good will he had created with his positive ads, and, as needed, use his advertising to remain in character while explaining and dismissing the allegations hurled against him by the bad guys?

Furr replied that mine was a nice-sounding idea, one that Hays would love to implement, but which simply didn't work.

Sadly for the state of our political dialogue, political professionals explain the current dynamic this way: When, in a campaign, you are beset by televised assaults on you by your opponent--as, in Hays' case, that he is supposedly a tax-raiser and Obama-conspirator and junketeer--a simple use of your television time to deny and refute those charges is a losing strategy.

The conventional wisdom is that you are merely repeating the charge against you and trying to explain more in 30 seconds than you can ably explain.

Meantime your opponent weathers no assaults against him.

So the busy voter, picking up a little peripheral message here and there from the volume on the television set in the kitchen as dinner is prepared, gleans a superficial message that is all about you, and all negative, and not at all about the other guy who is getting a free ride from you.

In other words: If you allow an election to become a referendum on your negatives alone, you will lose.

Or so they say.

So rather than continue to run your positive ads, and rather than use your advertising to deny and rebut point-by-point what he accuses, you need to prick the ears of that superficial dinner-preparer with something bad about the other guy.

The busy, superficial voter requires equal and simplistic slandering of all candidates, you see. It helps the busy, superficial voter make a fair and wise decision, you see.

A commercial saying that Hill, as a bank president, gave campaign contributions to extortion-convicted state treasurer Martha Shoffner and got $700 million in state bank deposits in return--well, maybe the superficial voter will hear that between the clanging of the pots and pans and forget for a moment that Hays got pay raises over 24 years as mayor, as if there was something wrong with that.

That this unspoken quid pro quo is a long-standing if unfortunate practice between private bankers and the state treasurer--smelly, but far less egregious than bribing the treasurer with personal walking-around money stuffed in a pie box in exchange for investment business ... well, that's too much to put in a commercial and it probably wouldn't get heard over the racket as the superficial voter loaded the dishwasher.

So what we have here is yet another chapter in the story of our political dysfunction.

A race defined 10 days ago by a nice guy's narrative about the perfectly fine job he did as mayor of his city is now a junior version of the U.S. Senate race.

And since the Republicans are coming into the race with extra heavy artillery from Karl Rove's group, Hays will simply have to amp up the Hannibal Lecter.

The ice cream has melted.

But we have plenty of fava beans.

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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 09/30/2014

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