When Ron Fournier of the Associated Press writes an article you can be almost assured that he’s trying to do damage to the left, and his piece on Arkansas politics is no exception. But he did give us some local color to kind of inform us about what this Blanche Lincoln/Bill Halter run-off election really means.
Skip Rutherford is a mainstay of the Arkansas political establishment — Clinton’s friend and booster who now runs the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
“I knew I was out of the loop when there was that Halter-Lincoln debate,” Rutherford says between drinks at the Capital Bar and Grill, a venerable political hangout. Halter drew more than 100 supporters outside the debate, compared with 10 for Lincoln.
The numbers didn’t bother Rutherford as much as what he didn’t know about Halter’s supporters.“I knew all 10 of Lincoln’s people,” he said, “and not a single one of Halter’s people. Who are they? What’s going on?”
Well, something is definitely going on when Bill Clinton goes to a traditionally all-black college in Arkansas and can only attract about 200 white people to listen to him talk about Blanche Lincoln in a half-empty gymnasium. But for real flavor, read on:
At a table across the barroom from Rutherford, leaders of Arkansas business debate how to save Lincoln’s candidacy. The heads of the state and city chambers of commerce join an executive with Stephens Inc., an investment banking firm known as much for its political king-making (and king-breaking) as its business acumen.
“We’re just trying to figure this race out,” said Randy Zook, president and CEO of the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce. Zook seems less interested in Lincoln’s future than curtailing labor’s ambitions.
“They want to put Senator Lincoln’s scalp on their walls,” he says.
Unrelated to this gathering at the bar — or so they say — two business-oriented organizations are spending heavily to help Lincoln, possibly on the assumption that she would be easier for Republicans to beat this fall. The GOP has gone establishment — this time — choosing Rep. John Boozman as its Senate nominee.
It’s a nice Fournier touch to suggest that these businessmen aren’t really supportive of Lincoln, but the truth is they’ll take her or Boozman. They don’t really care. And they have a healthy disregard for the intelligence of the voter.
The morning after the primary, Halter stood at a busy intersection in Little Rock and waved at commuters.
Lincoln? She was on a plane to Washington to vote on financial regulation, important legislation that could burnish her populist credentials if not for the fact that the nation’s capital is anything but populist — or popular — in the eyes of voters.
It was, as they say in politics, bad optics.“There ain’t 12 people in Arkansas,” scoffs Zook, “who can spell ‘derivatives’ correctly two times in a row.”
But they can spell G-A-Y and A-B-O-R-T-I-O-N, and that’s all the city and state Chambers of Commerce want them to be able to spell.