Appearing before about a thousand Republicans at a party fundraising dinner in Hot Springs on Friday night, New York blowhard Donald Trump was presented with the gift of a rifle.
This here is gun country.
And he raised his arms only a touch out of rhythm during the eerie hollering of the state mantra--"wooo pig, sooie," which roughly translates as "I am somebody."
All Trump needed for the full Arkansas experience was to go water-skiing--or para-sailing if the wind got in under his hair just right.
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The theme of Trump's address was Trump. He announced that he is great and that his detractors are stupid.
He said he'd browbeat our enemies and rivals into submission. He said he'd build our military into such a force that no one would mess with us, as if our military wasn't the most powerful in the world already and as if extremists and terrorists weren't crazy.
We've seen this act before in Arkansas, albeit performed in a more rural and populist way. I refer to a talking-tall character named Tommy Robinson.
Then Trump went to Iowa the next day and surely ruined whatever remote credibility he'd had when he left Arkansas.
He scoffed at the notion that John McCain, a critic of his, was any kind of hero. He said McCain didn't do anything except get captured.
Trump himself got military deferments, one because his foot hurt. It may or may not have been the same foot he put in his mouth in Iowa on Saturday. (I stole that one from a Twitter responder.)
With Democrats the next night at the Verizon Center in North Little Rock, Hillary Clinton elevated the spirit of an audience about twice the size of that for Trump. That means every remaining Democrat in Arkansas was there. The crowd included a discounted spectator element not permitted at the buffet.
Clinton outlined an economic agenda focused on fighting for working people and women in this elite-dominated economy unfairly neglecting the former and insufficiently valuing the latter.
So I'd written last week that the state Republicans had typically bested the state's Democrats again, landing for their big dinner the raging celebrity of Trump while Democrats had no card in their deck other than the frayed old non-trump Clinton one.
Now I think that was wrong. Actually, I'm pretty sure of it.
The Republican event was lame and the Democratic event successful. Such as they were.
The Republican guest speaker was a joke appearing one day ahead of making himself into toast. The Democratic speaker was solid and I put her chances of becoming president at slightly better than 50 percent.
Of course nothing really changed as a result of these narrowly partisan events. Nothing ever does.
Trump was a joke flying in and a joke flying out. Hillary was only a spirit-lifter coming in and only a spirit-lifter going out. Republicans were going to carry Arkansas going into the weekend, and they were going to carry Arkansas going out.
Hillary trails a generic Republican by nearly 20 points in a state that simply is not going to accede to reason as long as Barack Obama is in office trying to make peace and being fair to gay people.
Hillary raised money for the state party. And she engaged supporters who may give her money or sign up to canvass in 2016 in open-minded states that matter.
But, in the final analysis, this state Democratic dinner will take its place in history as yet one more tired, anachronistic event, a manifestation of the party's stubbornly lingering delusion over faded glories of the past.
Presiding Saturday night was state Democratic chairman Vince Insalaco, a mighty fine political operative from the early '80s, first known to me as manager of Paul Riviere's failed congressional bid in 1982.
You had Mike Beebe, a mighty fine rising legislative star of the '80s, introducing Hillary.
Then you had Hillary talking fondly of an Arkansas going back to the '70s, one amounting to a dim and ever-fading speck in her rearview mirror.
It all put me in mind of a GTO without GPS, or of a newspaper columnist from the '80s still writing four times weekly.
I read that Obama was mentioned once Saturday night, by Hillary, and that gay and lesbian rights went wholly unmentioned.
So it appears Arkansas Democrats are still trying to finesse divisive issues, a strategy that worked through 2008 but will get them about 37 percent in a general election today.
I'm told the idea is to avoid any alienating liberal labeling so that rural conservatives could still compete as nominal Democrats for local offices and the state Legislature.
That's pretty hollow--a "D" for the sake of a "D"--but maybe not as hollow as having Donald Trump as your speaker.
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 07/21/2015