By John Brummett
Let’s see if we might add a hint of drama to this forthcoming U. S. Senate race in which the Republicans will put the mildly vulnerable Blanche Lincoln dead in their sights.
They will vigorously contest her election to a third term next year with a candidate the identity of whom is, as yet, not at all apparent.
Doyle Webb, the state Republican chairman, tells me interest picked up in the last two to three weeks. I asked if this flurry coincided with the poll that came out the other day.
It showed Lincoln’s favorable-to-unfavorable rating at a precarious 45 percent to 40 percent. It had her idling under 50 percent, and ahead by only 10 or so points, in match-ups with mostly nondescript Republican challengers — state Sen. Gilbert Baker and Karl Rovian flame-thrower Tim Griffin.
“It picked up before that, actually,” Webb says. “It happened when Joe Biden came here for her.”
It’s Barack Obama, isn’t it? It’s Lincoln’s partisan and policy association with a president perceived as a liberal who got drubbed in this state by 20 points. Isn’t it?
“It’s Obama, yes, and it’s Joe Biden himself,” Webb says. “He’s a Northeastern liberal who came down to our conservative state in her behalf.”
Webb says he’s had three calls of interest in possibly running on the Republican side from persons he described as “more independent type people, people who are well-known and could even self-fund.” He is bound to secrecy.
By his description, he means persons apparently prominent in an apolitical way, perhaps in business, and, while clearly conservative, not identified so much with the Republican Party.
By self-funding, he means persons with ample personal resources sufficient to seed their own campaigns and demonstrate enough seriousness that the national Republicans would choose to make a real investment.
National Republicans are understandably squeamish about investing too heavily in a state that keeps electing moderate Democrats.
The emergence of an independent person of prominence and resources as a major Republican candidate is not without precedent in Arkansas. The late Frank White was a banker in Little Rock who’d formerly headed industrial development for a Democratic governor, David Pryor, when he came out of nowhere to upset Bill Clinton for governor in 1980. Sheffield Nelson came from the business and civic world, and a background in the Young Democrats, to become a major state Republican player.
Actually, the ultra-rich former Alltel executive, Scott Ford, has been talked about as a potential Republican challenger to Lincoln. When I asked Webb if Ford was among those to whom he was referring, he replied that he couldn’t say except these were people “of that type.”
Asked about all this, Lincoln’s veteran campaign manager, Steve Patterson, who seems to keep his ear pretty close to the ground, had a ready and dismissive rejoinder.
He said: “Do you just put anything they say in the paper? Are we supposed to believe that, because the vice president came here, and because we’re going to try to work where we can with an administration that’s going to be around for at least four years, three people with the money to self-fund have suddenly come out the woodwork?”
Well, yes, I do put it in the paper because they say it. And then I put what you say in the paper because you say it.
Of the potential candidates publicly mentioned, Webb said:
- He deems state Sen. Kim Hendren of Gravette, a firebrand conservative from the Republican hotbed of Benton County, altogether serious.
- He’s had several conversations with Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove disciple and political operative who got installed for a short while as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock in the Justice Department brouhaha, and is convinced that Griffin, too, is serious. Webb dismisses my hypothesis that Griffin has been acting merely as stalking horse to try to deliver body blows to Lincoln on the union card check issue. Webb says Lincoln has inflicted her own damage on card check by waffling.
- He thinks state Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway is preoccupied with the legislative session, where he’s chairman of the Joint Budget Committee.
- He believes that French Hill, a Little Rock banker with national Republican ties, is going through sincere contemplation as well.
Republicans didn’t even bother putting anyone up against U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor last year. Suffice to say that won’t happen next year. More likely, Webb says, is that the Republicans will have a U.S. Senate primary.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
