Arkansas Republicans have outdone not only Arkansas Democrats, but themselves.
I refer to the speakers the competing parties have secured for their back-to-back annual fundraising dinners this weekend.
The Arkansas GOP will feature the nation's biggest political newsmaker of the moment. The Arkansas Democrats are stuck with a Clinton, as usual, albeit one with at least an even chance to be the nation's next president.
What first seemed to be a catastrophic joke--the state Republican selection of the caricature calling itself Donald Trump as the Reagan-Rockefeller Dinner speaker Friday night in Hot Springs--turns out to be ... well, a joke, yes, but also a stroke of luck and timeliness.
Trump drew a few thousand people and the national media to a rambling speech at a county Republican event over the weekend in Arizona. He said on Twitter that 15,000 or so had attended. That was unlikely. He spoke in a room that, while overflowing, accommodated 4,100.
But restraint and credibility are not required to lead the latest poll of the Republican presidential primary. Celebrity is. And stereotyping immigrants is.
In 1999 Trump called himself "very pro-choice." But that doesn't matter for the moment to the emotional and irrational element of the Republican base, which hears only that he tells it like it is and doesn't like all these Mexicans running around.
Trump's outlandish statement slandering illegal immigrants as rapists and murderers--which caused a spate of business disassociations from him--has been given sanctuary, you might say.
It came from the apparently random shooting death July 1 of a young woman out for a stroll with her dad on a tourist pier in San Francisco. The senseless act apparently was committed by a man who would have been deported if only San Francisco wasn't a so-called sanctuary city declining to enforce federal immigration laws with any vigor or rigor.
There are sound reasons for so-called sanctuary cities, of which there are scores around the country. They reflect a strategic local law enforcement priority to forge police-immigrant trust and thus relieve pressure for crime and violence.
But no sanctuary city should turn loose from custody, or protect from the feds, a multiple-deportee and confirmed felon. That's well beyond the logic of letting immigrants live free of federal immigration worries day-to-day as long as they stay out of trouble otherwise.
This particular illegal immigrant accused in San Francisco had been deported five times. But San Francisco authorities released him in April on the reasoning that they had no basis to hold him further.
Federal authorities say a simple phone call with a heads-up would have prompted them to come claim the guy. San Francisco authorities said they would have needed a court order to relinquish the prisoner.
Oh, come on, say federal authorities, who say no such procedure is required except by a sanctuary city, and that they can't secure a court order unless they get a heads-up.
The right-wing base surely resents that federal authorities now tell states they must legalize gay marriages, but don't tell cities they must enforce federal immigrant law.
The difference is that aggrieved parties sued for same-sex marriage and won on the basis of constitutional principles.
A lawsuit against local governments and their police forces for exercising discretion about what kind of illegal activity to emphasize would be exceedingly harder to argue on behalf of anyone's violated rights.
Anyway, you can't easily blame public policy for a killer. If a county clerk shot dead a same-sex couple seeking a marriage license, would that be the fault of the Supreme Court? No. It would be the fault of a crazed and murderous county clerk.
Policies don't kill people. People kill people.
On Friday night, Trump brings his traveling show to Arkansas.
Then, on Saturday night at the Verizon Center in North Little Rock, we will have an anticlimax. Arkansas Democrats will play the only option in their battered deck. That's the well-worn Clinton card.
Hillary Clinton, the nearly presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has generated brisk ticket sales of her own for the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.
But there is a problem for Arkansas Democrats. It's that the Clinton brand no longer means anything to anyone in Arkansas outside of the party's aging establishment.
The state has endured a Republican revolution and the Democrats have responded with personalities popular and powerful in the 1980s.
But there is no one else on the national Democratic stage who would sell as many tickets as Hillary, or prove as palatable to an Arkansas audience or generate as much mainstream political connection. There is no rising Democratic star within the state suitable for the big speech--for promoting for governor or the U.S. Senate or Congress.
So it's the frayed old Clinton card, which is no trump.
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 07/14/2015