Brummett Online

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: His split personality


The ads ran nearly back-to-back the other night in a break during a local news telecast. They essentially announced that the Arkansas political primary season is in overdrive. They made clear that the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, meaning election, will get the glare of absurdity's spotlight.

One commercial said John Boozman was a liberal, a Republican in name only and Joe Biden enabler who simply had to be removed from the U.S. Senate.

The other referred to the first and said it was a lie because Boozman was a conservative's conservative who had the stamp approval of the ruling triumvirate of conservative sneer--Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Tom Cotton and Donald Trump.

State Sen. Jim Hendren, the neo-independent, put on Twitter that both commercials couldn't possibly be so. But they could.

The first is an opinion based on fact. Insanity can be fact-based. It's the interpretation of fact that can get crazy. But free expression covers crazy.

Boozman did indeed vote shortly after inauguration to confirm a few Biden Cabinet nominees, as the first commercial accuses.

The maker of the ad is a wealthy extremist in Illinois who has put a million dollars into a super PAC called Arkansas Patriots to aid the rabidly right Razorback, Jake Bequette. The wealthy extremist sees Boozman as a dreaded Mitch McConnell leftist. The ad maker doesn't believe Biden's presidency is legitimate and that, therefore, no real conservative Republican would let Biden have any assistants to help him run the government illegitimately. Bequette would never vote for any Biden nominee, you see.

That Boozman agreed to permit Biden a few Cabinet picks ought to commend him for sane, practical and fair-minded governance. And it would do just that in many jurisdictions, including those McConnell had in mind the other day when he said Republicans ought to sweep the midterms but could mess that up by nominating unelectable people.

But there is no such thing as an unelectable "R" in statewide Arkansas politics right now. The primary is the ballgame. In this current Arkansas Republican primary climate, a well-driven turnout will contain a significant coalition of the deplorably hostile and the pliably misinformed. And that was the target audience of the first ad.

That's why Boozman had to come back quickly with an answering ad that says he's such a genuine conservative and real Republican that Sanders, Cotton and Trump are for him--Sanders because she's an old friend of Boozman; Cotton because he and McConnell control Boozman, and Trump because Sanders (and maybe Cotton) asked him in John's behalf.

There is a coalition of the unpleasant that passes for a mainstream Republican establishment in Arkansas. Sanders, Cotton and Trump compose it.

So there you have the choice: The deplorably hostile and pliably misinformed--Bequette and other equally extreme but less-funded Senate hopefuls--against the unpleasantness of the Arkansas Republican mainstream--Sanders, Cotton and Trump, pulling the strings on Boozman, who actually is nice fellow who doesn't fit in either camp, which helps explain the disparate characterizations of him in rat-a-tat television commercials.

Boozman is reduced to saying, in effect, "Re-elect me because Sarah, Tom and Donald told you to and because I am just as extreme as the next guy."

Boozman might try running on his seniority-achieved chairmanship of the Senate Agriculture Committee. But that sounds pretty deep-state. And Blanche Lincoln held that chairmanship when Boozman ran against her and defeated her.

If this race gets at all close in the polling, there surely will be a last-week rally to save Boozman at which speakers will be Sanders, Cotton and Trump. Boozman won't be allowed to speak, so vulnerable is he as he stands alone in that no-man's land of contemporary Arkansas Republicanism--neither as deplorably hostile as the far right that smears him nor as unpleasant as the establishment right that controls him.

In that no-man's land, Boozman easily can appear as two entirely different people in a matter of seconds during a commercial break in the local news.

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.



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