A late political consultant of local renown once told me I understood governing politics but not campaign politics.
As I understood the critique, from jingle-master Jerry Russell, it was that I offered readers more insight on the maneuvering of a legislative session than a campaign.
It meant, for example, that I could grasp the political dynamic by which the Arkansas Legislature would coalesce on something like the private option. But it also meant I didn't understand the strategies and tactics of getting elected to become part of that dynamic.
That may be right. I am not prepared to argue.
I am prepared, though, to suggest a factor. It is that I readily acknowledge that I have a hard time accepting the decency of campaign tactics that often are dismissed as standard.
It could be that I understand full well the essence of campaign politics--that dishonest exploitation is the means to achieve the end, which is election of good-enough people to do good-enough things. It may be that I simply abhor that essence. It may be that I cannot abide these accepted tactics that make chumps of voters who too willingly let themselves get played that way.
We've had a run of examples lately.
U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor is the better choice than his Republican opponent, Tom Cotton. But that doesn't justify what the Senate Majority super-PAC did in a television commercial that helped turn the tide toward Pryor in the race.
The ad slandered Cotton as wanting to privatize Medicare to enrich private insurance companies for which the ad falsely accused him of having worked.
Appeals Court Judge Robin Wynne, a friendly acquaintance, was my preferred choice for the state Supreme Court until some mystery out-of-state group slandered his opponent as essentially a child abuser and Wynne chose merely to disassociate from the tactic rather than fully deplore, decry and denounce it.
State Rep. Terry Rice of Waldron unseated state Sen. Bruce Holland in the Republican primary last week. He did so after a campaign in which he and his backers assailed Holland for supporting Obamacare by voting for the private-option form of Medicaid expansion. But on the day after he won, Rice said he actually was neutral on the private option.
But perhaps the most vexing and complex example is that of state Sen. Linda Chesterfield, Democrat of Little Rock.
She was on a panel I moderated the other day. And because she is an African-American political leader, I fashioned a question to her based on a rally taking place that very day of African-American religious leaders denouncing the court ruling overturning the state ban on same-sex marriage.
I asked her, as an African-American speaking only for her elected self, if she saw in generally similar terms the current gay-marriage movement and the civil-rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.
"I do," she said.
She explained that her first elected obligation was to the Constitution, which requires equality. As for the Bible, she said some people choose to focus only on anti-homosexual passages, but that she chooses to focus on the admonishment that we all love each other.
Combining constitutional equality and biblical love compels her, she said, to view the gay-rights and civil-rights movements as much the same.
Agree or not with what she said--and I do--we can surely agree that Chesterfield's public stance as a state senator was a minority one in Arkansas and thus brave, even statesmanly.
So let's revisit the circumstance by which Chesterfield got nominated for this state Senate seat in the Democratic primary of 2010.
Also seeking the Democratic nomination was Jay Barth, the eminent political science professor at Hendrix College who is gay. Late in the campaign, Chesterfield ran a radio spot accusing Barth of lying by telling a group of gay and lesbian Democrats that he wanted to be the first openly gay man in the state Legislature, then denying to the NAACP a few days later that he ever said such a thing.
What he did was tell the gay audience that very thing, then truthfully deny a man's characterization at the NAACP event that he had said the "only" reason he was running was to become the first openly gay man in the Legislature.
Being gay was "his business," but he shouldn't lie about what he'd said, Chesterfield's ad charged.
In other words, Chesterfield fashioned a gymnastic rhetorical contortion to make sure everyone listening to local radio knew that her opponent was gay.
Then the ad said that Barth had stereotyped black persons as "lazy" by saying that Chesterfield had missed votes as a state representative. She had, in fact, missed a vote on an anti-bullying bill on which she was a co-sponsor.
So she managed in a couple of deft sentences to let the predominately black voters of the district know that her opponent was a homosexual and that she herself was black.
That's not to say Chesterfield is anything other than an able state senator, even an occasionally exemplary one.
In that panel discussion I lamented that big-money groups on the right accuse private-option supporters of backing Obamacare when, in fact, the private option is not Obamacare but a conservative adaptation of an element thereof.
Chesterfield told me to get over it. She said all is fair in love and politics.
Maybe it's true I don't understand. Or maybe I fully understand, and it simply makes me ill.
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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 05/29/2014