In Monday night's big debate, Mayor Frank Scott eloquently plied pulpit training to recast his management failings, secrecy and ethical outrages as "key learnings," which he said three times.
In other words: Re-elect him on the basis that he's messed up.
At least Bill Clinton took his whipping after a first term as governor before coming back two years later to win by apologizing. Scott wishes to skip the period of reflection and go straight to a blunder-catapulted reward.
Scott is as heavy on euphemisms and slogans--such as "grow forward," which sounds like my waistline--as he has been light on accountability, fiscal restraint and consensus-building, even as he still fancies and touts himself a unifier.
Retired car-dealer mogul Steve Landers--who challenges Scott because ... well ... there's crime--read his answers stiffly, regardless of the question. And still he didn't come to a point.
When he lifted his head to speak off-script, his sentences, to the extent they weren't fragments, came on strong with subjects and verbs but drifted away into the ether.
Landers will tell you he is never going to be the most eloquent politician, and he will have one thing right.
Greg Henderson, a nice young man with basic competence, spoke as if afraid he might actually get a lot of votes to fill the vast Scott-Landers void. He wouldn't say Scott did anything unethical or secretive in that LITfest debacle, but, yea or nay, he vowed he'd do it all a different way.
He actually got more worked up against Landers for a vague crime-fighting plan that includes police dogs.
Scott went further on that, much so, calling Landers' dog plan a "dogwhistle," apparently meaning it was racist in the way Bull Connor used attack dogs against Blacks in the 1960s in Birmingham.
I'm pretty sure Landers has too much trouble making basic sense to be sending coded intimations.
Earlier in the day, he'd told me he simply meant you can save a police officer's life by first sending in a trained dog to a domestic dispute when a man has a gun to a woman's head.
The first thing I did after hanging up the phone was hug Roscoe and Sophie, the beagles, and assure them I would never let Steve Landers take them.
Scott shot back that Landers wasn't talking about a canine police unit but about that dogwhistle. And Landers shot back that, yeah, well, Scott spent all that city money on using two police officers as bodyguards.
The direct link from dogs to those two officers was not clear. I don't think Landers meant that he'd take those two officers off Scott's bodyguard detail and send them in to confront an armed man in a domestic dispute, unless, that is, he could have more dogs.
The candidates also argued about parks. Some time back, Landers said we had too many parks for the budget and he'd shut down some to maintain the others well.
Henderson said that would be just awful and he wouldn't close any parks.
Scott said many of our parks are east of I-30 and south of I-630 in the neighborhoods plagued by poverty and crime.
Either Henderson or Scott called park-reduction "heartless." I don't want to have to look at the video again to find out which.
Landers seems to think Henderson is running half-heartedly as an agent for Scott. But that makes no sense because Henderson takes votes from Scott. So, maybe that's why he's half-hearted.
Who knows? Or much cares at this point? Whatever happens, we'll have a city manager to cancel the worst things and city directors who'll protect their areas. Either Scott will be trying to remember those "key learnings," or Landers will be trying to figure out where he left that gun he carries because he fired the bodyguards.
All the candidates except Landers endorsed recreational marijuana--not for use during the debate, temptation aside, but as a new state law.
Landers wouldn't take a position, perhaps because he had nothing to read on that issue. Or, to his possible credit, he could have been hesitant owing to his work on prisoner re-entry programs and awareness of the role drugs play in criminal behavior.
I came away thinking that, next time, Landers should send Baker Kurrus as his sub and Henderson should try to locate and dispatch Warwick Sabin, and we could replay that happier and more competent time amid such high hopes four long years ago.
P.S.--There is a fourth candidate, Glen Schwarz, who amused himself and a few spectators in the debate.
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.