I know what Curtis Coleman was trying to say. I also know he won’t get many votes in southeastern Arkansas. And I also know he’s not the goofiest guy running or thinking of running for the U.S. Senate on the Republican side next year.

Coleman is a businessman with some sort of safe food research firm in Little Rock. He is an old friend of Mike Huckabee, having served as Huckabee’s campaign chairman in 1992 when Huckabee ran for the U. S. Senate and called Dale Bumpers a pornographer for supporting federal money for the arts. Coleman is of the evangelical religion variety and may have a done a little preaching himself at some point.

He has been exploring making this Senate run on the GOP side against Blanche Lincoln, and, in that context, he ventured the other day to the Republican hotbed of Benton County and gave a talk to Republicans.

What he was trying to say, obviously, is that the majority Republicans in insulated Benton County, home to Wal-Mart and relative prosperity, could not possibly understand the statewide political challenges of running as a Republican. Southeast Arkansas was a different world, he meant to say, culturally, economically, politically. And he just wanted the cozy Republicans there in Benton County to be made aware of that.

But what he said — according to a piece in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette — was that you needed a visa and shots to enter Southeast Arkansas.

Yeah. That’s the quote.

He was making a clever reference that would be appropriate at a friendly dinner party. It was, however, a disastrous political faux pas to get caught seeming to say that a part of your desired constituency is like an entirely alien country, one presumably where you might contract some kind of disease.

Once in the ’90s I drove to Dermott to interview Bynum Gibson, local attorney and then state Democratic chairman. I became so overwhelmed by the desolation that I came back to the office and wrote not about Gibson, but about what a horrible place Gibson lived in. But, see, I was not running for anything. I wasn’t going to be asking Dermott for any votes.

I also have said in speeches from time to time that going from Southeast Arkansas to Northwest Arkansas is to take a trip that sometimes I’ve called intergalactic and sometimes interplanetary. But, again, I wasn’t running for anything and, actually, I was citing differences without insulting one or the other by saying you’d need shots if you ventured there.

There is great art in the political ability to run your mouth constantly while stopping that mouth just before you say something akin to what Coleman went ahead and said.

But at least Coleman isn’t Kim Hendren, who, having referred to Chuck Schumer as “the Jew” or “that Jew,” got quoted the other day as speculating we might be better off if we could get people into the U.S Senate without their having to stand for consideration by the voters.

Again, whether that’s true is irrelevant to the point that you can’t well run for office by saying you’d rather not.

Why do I have that headline — Gilbert? Gilbert?

It’s because I still think State Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway is the Great Republican Hope. He is energetic. He is personable. I’ve seen him run his mouth a mile a minute and stop it on a dime.