It was lunch hour on Memorial Day, and U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton was taking a break in his Little Rock office in the Victory Building near the state Capitol. His mother, Avis Cotton from Dardanelle, was traveling with him on this day. Arkansans came to know Cotton's parents from television ads during his successful 2014 campaign against Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor. The elder Cotton was dressed in red, white and blue for the holiday, as were several members of the senator's staff.
Cotton and his wife, Anna, have two sons born 19 months apart. The oldest is 25 months old. With no ads on television, you don't hear much these days about Cotton's parents, his wife or the boys. Those who oppose him politically have done their best to turn Cotton into a caricature--an automaton who spouts talking points from highly conservative think tanks and casts ideologically driven votes that are against the best interests of rank-and-file Arkansans. It's the picture they've tried to paint, and they've achieved success with those on the left end of the political spectrum nationwide. These are people who consider Cotton a menace to democracy. They've not been as successful among the aforementioned rank-and-file Arkansans. Cotton remains highly popular in the state. For now, at least, Arkansas is Cotton country.
One thing cannot be denied by those on the left, the right or in the middle: Cotton has maintained an extremely high profile for a senator in his first term. When I covered Capitol Hill in the 1980s, we were still in an era when freshmen senators were to be seen and not heard. Cotton was a regular on the network television talk shows during his first months in the Senate. The media had learned during Cotton's lone term representing the 4th District of Arkansas in the U.S. House from 2013-15 that he is what's known as a "good interview"--someone who will defend his party's positions with solid facts and figures while being a bit controversial at times.
Cotton has kept such a lofty media profile, in fact, that the inevitable rumors that he's thinking about running for president surfaced when he recently scheduled a speech in Iowa. There's an old saying in the nation's capital that the Senate consists of 100 individuals who think they should be the next president. Cotton smiles when I mention that to him and says: "I think there are a lot of House members who feel the same way." He has reportedly offered advice to the president during the tumultuous first months of the Trump administration. Cotton measures his words carefully when I ask him about the daily roller coaster ride known as the Trump era. He describes Trump's recent nine-day foreign trip as "a diplomatic and political success" and says the president was "disciplined and focused" while abroad.
Disciplined and focused. Those are the first words I would use to describe Tom Cotton. He just turned 40 on May 13, and already people are talking about him as a future candidate for president. Raised on his family's farm in Yell County, he made the leap from Dardanelle High School to Harvard, where he was disciplined and focused enough to obtain a degree in three years while cutting his conservative teeth with stories in the Harvard Crimson.
Cotton went on to receive his law degree from Harvard in 2002, clerked for a federal appeals court judge, entered private practice, then enlisted in the U.S. Army in January 2005. Due to the large amount of money spent on ads for his 2012 House race and 2014 Senate race, Arkansans became familiar with his service in Iraq, where Cotton led an infantry platoon and participated in combat patrols. Though a June 2006 open letter to the editor of the New York Times accusing Times reporters of violating espionage laws by writing about secret programs wasn't published by the newspaper, it went viral on conservative websites.
He later served in Afghanistan and in the Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery. By late 2010, after Cotton had transferred to the U.S. Army Reserve, I was hearing from Arkansas Republicans about a possible political candidate with what they described as "a dream résumé." I've read about Cotton almost every day since. When I was growing up in this state, the Arkansan who received the most attention on the national stage was Sen. J. William Fulbright, the outspoken chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Though Arkansans often disagreed with Fulbright on issues, most took pride in having one of their own making Arkansas look good on national television with erudite answers. It was a time when many of the Southern politicians portrayed on the network news were loudmouthed demagogues.
Cotton is for Republicans these days what Fulbright was for Democrats half a century ago--a man who lights up when the subject is foreign relations, an iconoclast, someone who comes across as prepared in interviews, someone who's not adverse to making controversial stands, someone who's on every list of future presidential candidates.
Unlike Fulbright, who had a reputation for coming home mainly in election years, Cotton spends considerable time in Arkansas. Our visit on Memorial Day came between a morning appearance at Girls State at Harding University in Searcy and Boys State at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. He also does regular live interviews with Arkansas radio stations. As a student of history, he's well aware of how Fulbright's reputation of having forgotten the folks back home caught up with him in 1974 when a popular governor named Dale Bumpers challenged him in the Democratic primary.
The other similarity between Fulbright and Cotton is the vehemence of their opponents. I moderated the public meeting that Cotton and U.S. Rep. French Hill held in Little Rock earlier this year as almost 1,000 people packed a ballroom at Embassy Suites. It seemed as if half those 1,000 people were screaming at the top of their lungs each time Cotton tried to speak. Cotton, of course, remained disciplined and focused. It's a style that has put him front and center on the national political stage at a young age.
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Rex Nelson is a senior editor for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 06/11/2017