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Newspaper endorsement editorials are notoriously snooze-inducing affairs. (Maybe thatās why weāre seeing a spate of non-endorsements this yearāitās the only way to attract attention.) But the press corps down in Arkansas seems to have found the recipe for livening up this journalistic stand-by: Start with a hilariously understated recommendation for your preferred candidate. Add a bizarre bit of political history, retrieved from the vault and introduced by way of a non sequitur question. Sprinkle in a nod to the local political culture, and presto!
We first saw this formula at work in the amazing Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial endorsing John Boozman in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate, flagged here a little while back. That piece would have been remarkable if only for its rather, er, reserved enthusiasm for the veteran Republican congressman (āgood old, dull old John Boozmanā; āplain, reliable, and quite predictableā; āall the characteristics of the dull gray speciesā). But it also set off on a trip down memory lane by posing a timeless question (āremember good old Monroe Schwarzlose, the turkey farmer from Kingslandāno, outside Kingslandāwho put such a scare into Bill Clinton?ā). As for down-home credentials, well, consider the lead-in to the Schwarzlose section (āThose were the days, my friend, we thought theyād never end. Not in good olā, fesity olā, populist olā Arkinsaw.ā)
All in all, a tour de force performance. But lest you think this formula only works in the Republican races, take a look at the column penned today by Ernest Dumas for the alternative weekly Arkansas Times, which wades into the hard-fought Democratic primary, where Blanche Lincoln and Bill Halter are still duking it out. Hereās the opening:
For Democrats, the election season comes down to this: Assuming that a Democrat has any chance to beat the old Republican left tackle for the Razorbacks for the U.S. Senate, is it more likely to be Sen. Blanche Lincoln or Lt. Gov. Bill Halter?
Forget Senator Lincoln’s Agriculture chairmanship and her lovely personality and Halter’s wretched lottery and his off-putting ambition. Halter is a Democrat’s only chance, and in this cheerless year it is not a great one.
So Halterās signature policy achievement is āwretched,ā heās a creepy careerist, and heās almost sure to lose to Boozman in the general, but heās the best chance youāve got. Are you pumped yet?
Thatās the back-handed praise. How about the history, introduced by an interrogative?
Yes, [Lincoln] did beat [Boozmanās] brother Fay in her first election to the Senate in 1998 and might hope for the same matchup. Both Boozmen were prone to gaffes but can she hope for a godsend like Fay’s famous āGod’s protective little shieldā?
Dr. Boozman, an ophthalmologist who was the Republican Senate nominee, proclaimed that women who were raped were not apt to get pregnant because a woman’s body emitted protective hormones when she was having unwanted sex and they prevented her from conceiving. That was his justification for opposing abortion for women who said they had been raped.
Despite his slight daffiness Fay remained beloved in Northwest Arkansas until his death in 2005, when his barn gate fell on him, but āGod’s little shieldā turned the tide for Lincoln in 1998.
Check. As for local color, Dumas doesnāt toss in any āgood oleā-speak, but he does offer this little rumination on the source of Boozmanās appeal:
Is he beatable at all? The Republican-leaning Rasmussen polls say no. Congress.orgās power ratings of the 435 members of Congress rank Boozman 386th.
In poor Arkansas, āHey, we’re 386th!ā is a pretty good battle cry.
Judged by entertainment value and brutal honesty, Iād have to give the edge to the Democrat-Gazette, which kicked things up a notch with a spectacularly jaundiced meditation on the paint-by-numbers style of most endorsements (āThen end the thing with a -30- and a great big Yawn.ā) Still, hereās hoping that after the June 8 runoff, some of these Arkansas journalists team up to offer a master class in their technique to endorsement writers around the rest of the country. The first step to informing readers, after all, is giving them something that deserves to be read.
P.S. Dumas, for one, is sure to remember Schwarzlose. According to the turkey farmerās sadly under-sourced Wikipedia entry, Dumas, then an associate editor at the Arkansas Gazette, quipped of Schwarzloseās quixotic 1980 gubernatorial run: āeven Hee Haw gets tiresome on the third rerun.ā
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