I hadn’t thought about it, but I guess it is not all that surprising that Arkansas has had only one Republican senator since Reconstruction. Of course, they haven’t had many Democratic senators who history will be kind to. For most of that time the Democrats dominated because they were unapologetically racist, which is what the people of Arkansas wanted them to be. These days, institutionalized ‘legal’ racism is not a campaign issue and the Republicans are the party for pissed off white people. Ironically, that makes it more likely that the Republicans will win Blanche Lincoln’s seat.
It may be a measure of the electorate’s angry mood that the Democratic Senate candidate who got the biggest cheer from the steak lovers assembled amid a charcoal haze to worship charred red meat was D. C. Morrison, a former cotton farmer who wants to repeal the new health care law, seal the southern border and abolish income taxes in favor of a consumption tax. “I think there’s just a general distrust of Washington,” Mr. Morrison explained with a touch of down-home understatement.
The only role D.C. Morrison could play tomorrow is getting just enough votes to deny either Lincoln or Lt. Gov. Bill Halter the fifty percent of the vote they’ll need to avoid a run-off election. But it’s instructive that a Democrat can win applause lines by advocating less access to health care, more regressive taxation, and a crackdown on Latinos.
Republicans smell blood in the water. The leading Republican candidate in Tuesday’s primary is Representative John Boozman, a conservative who is running against the health care overhaul and the stimulus bill. “We cannot borrow and tax our way into prosperity,” he said at the cook-off.
Polls show Mr. Boozman easily beating any of the Democrats if the election were today, prompting an Arkansas News columnist, John Brummett, who supports Mr. Halter, to write of the primary, “All we’re doing here is picking someone to get beat in November.”
Bill Halter has a better chance of holding the seat than Lincoln, but that isn’t saying much. The people of Arkansas will get the representation they want…and deserve. Even Halter is running against the bailout. But at least he is trying out the populist approach I’ve long advocated for southern progressives.
On the stump Halter is campaigning more as a champion of the little guy than as an outspoken liberal. “I’m running to put Washington back on the side of middle-class Arkansas families,” he says over and over. His goal and challenge is to capture the anti-Washington sentiments of the electorate, thus far exploited by the tea partyers, and steer that anger in a more progressive direction while painting his opponent as an ally of big banks and corporate downsizers. In Monticello, Halter criticizes the TARP bailout, Wall Street recklessness and the mounting federal deficit while plugging his record on education and pledging to eliminate tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.
Everyone seems to expect a Republican Revolution in Arkansas this November, but if Halter can pull off an upset his form of populism could provide a template different from the Blue Dog blueprint for southern Democrats. For that reason alone, it’s worth hoping that he can force a run-off.
