The funniest article in Sunday's paper reported that Conner Eldridge had formally announced his Democratic candidacy for the U.S. Senate by saying we would always know where he stood on issues.
That was the essence of one paragraph in the article.
But there were ensuing paragraphs reporting that Eldridge had declined to say how he would have voted on Obamacare and whether he supported continued funding for Planned Parenthood.
Perhaps Eldridge was telling us straight. We will always know, I guess, that he is either for an issue or against an issue or firmly and frightfully astraddle it.
Meet the new generation of Arkansas Democrats. Same as the old generation of Arkansas Democrats. And Arkansas voters won't get fooled again.
There is no finesse in him, Eldridge declared, seconds before he commenced finessing.
Perhaps he was responding to a column in this space saying that the once-great but now tired Democratic finesse in Arkansas--of trying to distance oneself from the national Democratic Party by slicing and dicing difficult issues to appear an incrementally conservative version of a Republican--had died with the miserable recent showings of such once-accomplished straddlers as Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor and Mike Ross.
Now comes young Conner, a former U.S. attorney for the western district of Arkansas, to run in the same cookie-cut form as Blanche, Mark and Mike.
That cookie-cut form once was a ticket to victory in Arkansas. But then the advent of Fox News and the Internet caused Arkansas politics to be considered in a national context, not a state one, and the straddle became not a matter of clever victory, but of badly split britches and 40 percent.
Conner will do well to get 40 percent against the blandly comfortable John Boozman. I'm predicting 38. But whatever he gets will be the same, because he is the "D" in an "R" state, regardless of whether he embraces his national party or tries in comical vain to finesse what he denies he's trying to finesse.
How did Boozman's campaign respond to Eldridge?
Speaking of cookie-cut forms ...
Boozman's spokesman simply called Eldridge a name. He called him a Barack Obama appointee, which he was.
Eldridge's stint as U.S. attorney came as a result of recommendation by the state's then-Democratic senators, those ultimately failed straddlers named Lincoln and Pryor, and formal nomination, based on that recommendation, by the White House.
I happen to know a little about this finesse, this straddle, because I once held forth on it and bragged on it.
I went around giving talks explaining that Arkansas had not gone Republican as had all other Southern states because its Democratic politicians knew how to straddle without splitting their britches.
Once Marion Berry, the former Democratic congressman, told me that Howard Dean, the then-Democratic national chairman, would be calling me the next day. I took that to be for an interview, which I conducted.
But, as it happened, Dean wanted to chat about what he'd heard from Berry about my theories on the lingering electability of Democrats in Arkansas.
Then, in 2004, I got offered an interview with Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards on his bus after he spoke at a rally in North Little Rock's Riverfront Park. It turned out that he, too, wanted to inquire about my observations on how Democrats were still competitive in Arkansas.
Glory days. They'll pass you by.
Dean ended up telling me that Democrats could handle the gun-control issue by saying "if one state wants gun control--fine; and if another doesn't--also fine."
That's not remotely so anymore. The issue now, driven by a tragic array of mass shootings, is one of fully nationalized debate on background checks and gun-show exceptions and mental illness.
And John Edwards? Who remotely cares anymore what he ever said, asked or thought? He turned out to be one of the worst people ever.
And the John Kerry-Edwards campaign gave up in Arkansas, aware, I'm sure, that whatever in-state strategy was working for Democrats was not applicable to a Democratic presidential nominee running from, say, Massachusetts.
Consider the narrow matter of Eldridge and Obamacare: He won't say what he thinks about it because he wasn't in the Senate when it passed. But he praises the Arkansas private-option form of Medicaid expansion, which wouldn't exist without Obamacare.
And he says Obamacare is here to stay, good or bad, and that we ought to try to improve it. He offers a tax credit for small business.
So what did Boozman's spokesman say in response to that? He said Obamacare is terrible and you can't fix that which is irreparable, least of all with a little edge-tinkering tax credit.
Once Arkansas was a one-party state offering voters no real choice. And now it still is.
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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 10/20/2015