Mayoral candidate Steve Landers boasted on Twitter the other day that he got an arrow up in this column ... back in May.
It was for proposing a couple of police-related actions that the Frank Scott administration subsequently took. That kind of thing happens all the time in re-election campaign season. Challengers seek to exploit; incumbents seek to cover posteriors.
But Landers took pride, if by time-delay.
Being given to quip and even hyperbole in these arrow-firing columns, with up meaning good and down meaning bad in terms of ever-fleeting conventional wisdom, I wisecracked in May that Landers had thus accomplished more as a candidate for mayor than the last several actual mayors had accomplished put together. That was not meant literally, you see.
But it was what the former car-dealer mogul was boasting of specifically, or permitting his Twitter-writer to boast of.
That put me in mind to do another arrow column to see how Landers would fare this time, and to try to hold the quips and hyperbole to a minimum.
Here goes:
⬆ Steve Landers--He is not Frank Scott. So, he is not caught in a vortex of smart-blogger investigations and revelations of secrecy and irregularity. Landers has done nothing on his own to earn this arrow up, a provision I insert for reference should he try to brag again.
⬇ Frank Scott--It's not as bad as it sounds for him. He still has base-vote advantages. But it certainly is not good. He came into office with big plans to be a new kind of powerful mayor while moving Little Rock toward being the next great Southern city. Few in City Hall or the general population were fired up for any of that, or him. Distrust grew between Scott and the city board members who liked it better when they were all little mayors in their own minds.
Scott hired a consulting firm that was kind of simultaneously hiring his friend and chief of staff. He kept the contract amount low enough not to require city board approval. The contract was for helping on a city startup festival few were clamoring for and which has been bedeviled by problems. Now the contract is pulled for non-performance, Scott looks shady, and city residents look askance and aghast.
⬆ Blue Hog Report--This blog, the work of lawyer Matt Campbell, took down Scott's little festival in a way that is the stuff of legend. It's not all the information he gets, though that's impressive. It's the snarky narrative he weaves with it.
⬆ Chris Jones--I hear repeatedly that the Democratic gubernatorial nominee regularly takes his easy and engaging manner into rural Arkansas and connects well with the old boys who pat him on the back and tell him he's the best Democrat they've seen come around in a while. They'll vote Republican, of course, but turning the political ship around for Democrats in the rural Arkansas sea has to start somewhere, if only by yukking it up with the country folks.
⬇ Vice President Kamala Harris--There are things that are true that you dare not even intimate in politics. One is that, in hurricane-torn Florida, equity--meaning fairness--dictates that we make special efforts to tend to the disaster losses of the poor and disadvantaged.
There is nothing that so frightens and angers a working-class white swing voter in, say, Florida, as looking at the rubble of his home and hearing the vice president of the United States say he is not a priority, which is what he heard.
What the vice president should have said is that everyone will be taken care of with all deliberate speed and that pains will be taken to assure that nobody is left out. Same thing, smaller headline, less resentment.
⬆ Joe Biden--He once was considered reckless and gaffe-prone, but then he brought in a vice president who made him seem measured and commanding.
⬆ Republicans--They'll probably take back the U.S. House, launch all manner of investigations of Democrats and force the gridlock that many Americans, after watching what happens when either party is in control, have come to prefer, or at least to choose for safety.
⬇ Democrats--They might keep the U.S. Senate, which would be an extraordinary accomplishment in an off-year for the party in power with inflation raging. It also would be a testament to the power of women when mobilized by the abortion decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. It also would be the result of bad Trumpian candidates in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
⬇ Arkansas teachers--They'll end up with raises that will have them paid almost as much as teachers in Mississippi.
⬇ Sam Pittman--Speaking of trailing Mississippi ... In today's college football atmosphere, your arrow direction is simply the outcome of your most recent game. And it was not a good one for Sam.
What worries me on Thursday is that the game coming Saturday at Mississippi State might well send the next arrow downward too.
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.