The comedic value of contemporary Arkansas politics was manifest in the filing period that ended Monday for candidacies in next year’s primaries and general election.
For one thing, the filing period was held so absurdly early because of a law moving our primaries to March 1. That was done by the now-controlling Republicans so that Mike Huckabee could enjoy early leverage for his presidential bid by racking up in the state of his birth and long gubernatorial service.
Now it’s possible Huckabee won’t remain in the race even at that advanced date.
So that’s kind of laughable.
Then it turned out that perennial Tea Party candidate Curtis Coleman wandered in Monday to file to oppose U.S. Sen. John Boozman in the Republican primary.
Coleman said Boozman is not conservative enough, which is like saying an Arkansas summer is not humid enough.
Yes, it can be more humid. But why would you want it to be?
The recent Arkansas Poll suggests that many of you don’t know the low-key Boozman, your senior senator. But to the extent that you know him, and will soon be reminded of him, you surely deem him a solid good ol’ boy conservative Arkansas Republican, indeed something resembling the quintessence thereof.
He played for the Hogs as an undersized lineman. He drove muscle cars in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Come on.
Boozman’s illegitimacy as a conservative, according to this Coleman fellow and the conservative fringe that supports him and listens by the literal dozens to a couple of eerie talk-radio shows, is evidenced by his voting a time or two for the nation to pay its bills. That was rather than refusing to raise the debt ceiling.
You see, Boozman embeds in his genuine conservatism a quiet and unassuming reasonableness, which is unacceptable to the zealous apocalyptic wing of his party. So the difference some have with him is not actually about his being conservative. It’s about his having good sense.
So the only value of Coleman’s candidacy is mostly its ironic and humorous effect.
Coleman ran against Boozman and six others in the Republican senatorial primary in 2010. Boozman got 52 percent and won without a runoff. Coleman came up fifth with 4.9 percent.
The best question suitable for over-under betting — if you were inclined — is whether Coleman will exceed or fall short of the meager 27 percent he got last year in a two-man race with Asa Hutchinson for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
He also thought Asa wasn’t conservative enough.
Democrats, speaking of humor, say there is momentum for the young lawyer named Conner Eldridge, who is their candidate for the general election against Boozman. They base that on the aforementioned factor that Boozman is so low-key that poll respondents don’t know him in great numbers. Democrats also note that national Republicans have been griping that Boozman hasn’t ginned up his fundraising.
Boozman had a heart episode more than a year ago. And he was mellow even before that.
But Arkansas voters will know Boozman by Election Day. They’ll know he’s the Republican incumbent and that the Eldridge youngster got named to his federal prosecutor’s job by Barack Obama, whose approval rating in Arkansas was 28 percent in the Arkansas Poll released last week.
That means 72 percent of the poll respondents did not like a rescued economy. And that’s also funny.
Actually, there’s no real choice for Arkansas voters. Eldridge insists on running in the mold of epic losers Mark Pryor and Mike Ross. He touts himself as a conservative Democrat hardly distinguishable from the sensibly conservative Republican he challenges.
Eldridge might in fact vote differently than Boozman if elected. But Arkansas voters haven’t fallen for that once-reliable bait-and-switch since 2010.
Speaking of Arkansas Democrats and their remarkable headfirst collapse since 2010, they managed to produce an opponent for only one of the state’s four Republican delegates to the U.S. House of Representatives. That’s French Hill in the 2nd District of central Arkansas. He is opposed by Democrat Dianne Curry.
But get this: The Libertarian Party, a fringe group that doesn’t believe much in government, has come up with candidates in all four of those congressional districts.
So don’t let anybody tell you Arkansas is a one-party state.
Welcome, in fact, to the new four-party Arkansas.
You have your main Republicans, and they are in charge.
You have your talk-radio audience that composes the Tea Party Republican element, which keeps the main Republicans from behaving too sensibly.
You have the Libertarians, who think the Republicans aren’t any better than Democrats on letting people live wild and free.
And you have the young man in the Mike Ross mask running against Boozman as a DINO, meaning Democrat in name only.
Oh, by the way: Republicans had 115 candidates file for state legislative seats while the Democrats had 58.
All of the foregoing represents the kind of thing that’s been happening in states around us for more than a decade.
We’re just catching up. Or catching down.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.