To begin, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton is due consideration for a mitigating factor.
A National Public Radio interviewer confronted him with a listener's question at the time-pressed conclusion of their conversation last week, then asked that he please be brief in his response.
Basically, the host was saying keep it short about the corrupting influence of money in politics.
But Tom was uncommonly obliging.
The NPR host was questioning Cotton mostly but not entirely in the context of the little media tour the Trump acolyte has been on to tout some sort of book he's written.
But, as is usually the case, the host was interspersing general news-cycle questions as well as relating queries sent in by listeners via social media or email.
So at the end, stressing that time was about up, the host relayed one final emailed question from a listener. It was whether Cotton had any concerns about the "huge, ever-increasing amount of money" required for running for office, and its corrupting influence and, if so, what reforms he had in mind.
It only takes a couple of seconds to be flip.
"No, I don't," Cotton said, meaning he had no such concerns.
He added, "We spend much less on politics in this country than we do on potato chips or toothpaste."
He said people busy in the working world don't have time to volunteer for campaigns and that making donations to favored candidates is a good way for them to engage in the political process.
When you think about it, there's not much left to say after the junior senator has been as smugly dismissive as that.
This, thus, was the fourth book-related media interview Cotton had blown in eight days.
He dismissed farmer and consumer harm from President Trump's tariffs as less than giving one's life for one's country, as if one remotely compared to the other. He spouted about the ease of routing Iran militarily, which used bellicosity where complexity was the issue. And he blamed "unelected judges" for the abortion-issue division in America, never mind that taking control of unelected judgeships to undercut abortion rights through litigation was the very objective, indeed essence, of the conservative movement over the last four decades.
Then Cotton haughtily pooh-poohed the genuinely corrupting--not to mention polarizing--effect of the Citizens United ruling that permits unlimited sums of money for political advocacy, much of it kept secret by abuse of expansive networks of oddly named organizations advancing political philosophies or special interests by giving money to each other to pass on in a laundered condition to political candidates, more lucratively, but far from entirely, to Republicans.
The cancer is that this causes a high-finance arms race that leaves those who win elections so beholden to their big-money supporters that they dare not engage in independent or moderate or bipartisan thought.
But our state's junior senator confronts all that and says, oh, come on, what we spend on politics is less than we spend on over-the-counter oral health and hygiene products.
And to that I say ... so what?
It means nothing. There's no basis for judging donated money's effect on politics in the same equation with the near-universal American practice of brushing our teeth.
Even if we spent more money on toenail polish than politics, what would that mean to the issue of money's corrupting political influence?
And that's the point: Money spent on toothpaste is for cleanliness and health. Money spent on politics is for influence on political representation and policy influence.
If toothpaste indeed leads politics in money expended for it, then all that means is that brushing teeth is a near-universal human activity while political influence is a game for the monied few, which is the problem.
And it's quite possible that a working person without time to canvass neighborhoods for a preferred political candidate also has very little unbudgeted cash to give to a politician otherwise raking in fat checks in buckets from secret cabals.
A working man's 100 bucks, if he had it to give, probably seems less commanding to a candidate reaping the benefit of vast sums of dark money paying for deceptive attack ads that smear and destroy his opponent.
Another bright young Harvard-educated Arkansas politician, Clarke Tucker, had a recent essay proposing disclosure of dark-money sources and public matching funds that would supplement small-dollar donations.
That's a little more thoughtful. It's a little less conducive to smug brevity. And it's a lot more relevant.
By taking Cotton's toothpaste comparison and running with it, we could assess the situation this way: The problem is that rich secret cabals have bought up all the Crest.
As for potato chips, the issue seems to be that they go better with sandwiches than small political contributions paling against the big money.
------------v------------
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/28/2019