By John Brummett

I’m on record saying that the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate next year would be in attendance when Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway and lawyer-soldier Tom Cotton of Dardanelle sat down to talk.

They have talked since I wrote that.

I’ll stick with my assertion, though with one modification: I was thinking only one would run. They both might.

Here’s the word on Cotton: He is 33, a graduate of Harvard Law who was first a law clerk and then a practicing lawyer in Washington when, after Sept. 11, 2001, he enlisted in the Army infantry. Then he led men as a lieutenant in Baghdad.

Then he became irate that The New York Times published an article disclosing American intelligence techniques in tracking terrorist money. So he wrote a letter to the Times that became mildly famous among conservatives for assailing the newspaper for effectively making itself complicit in bombings that might kill his men.

After the Baghdad service, Cotton signed up to go to Afghanistan. Now he’s back in Virginia, a captain, awaiting discharge Sept. 30, after which he intends to move home to Arkansas and, I’m told reliably, announce forthwith his Republican candidacy for the Senate. He and his intended apparently have postponed the wedding on account of pressing political matters.

I know a left-leaning lifelong Democrat who says that this guy Cotton, political leanings aside, is the real deal in terms of intelligence, decency and being altogether admirable.

I did a Google search on him and found a piece he wrote for the Harvard Crimson in the 1990s that offered actual insight on Bill Clinton.

Cotton wrote that Clinton was the most effective political campaigner of a generation because he was sincere in his interactions with people. By this Cotton meant that Clinton was sincere at the moment, and sincere the next time, and sincere with all other people in between.

A natural-born serial connector — that’s what Clinton always was, and is, and Cotton sized it up accurately and described it well.

It remains wholly to be determined whether Cotton possesses any gradation of that kind of talent. Some element of it is necessary. You don’t get elected on a resume adorned by Harvard and/or military service. Otherwise we’d have President Bob Dole, President John Kerry, President John McCain, President Wes Clark, U.S. Sen. Nate Coulter and Gov. Bill Bristow.

Cotton and Baker have now sized each other up. And all I can tell you about that is this: Baker, the most energetic and personable figure in the Arkansas Republican Party, is not yet bowing out.

He may yet. But, for the moment, he remains convinced that the prevailing requisite need for a Republican challenger to Lincoln (or Baker’s good pal Bob Johnson, I guess we now must add) is a demonstrated ability to raise lots of money.

And here’s the curious and complicated timing: Baker thinks he needs to be deciding fairly soon, in September, actually, thus to begin his own fund-raising. And that is before Cotton will be discharged from the Army, thus before Cotton could mount a candidacy, much less demonstrate an ability to raise significant sums of money.

Cotton might be God’s gift to Arkansas Republicans. But he won’t be able to show that empirically before the time Baker figures he needs to do his business or get off the pot.

Baker has pretty much played out this hand of the passive observer of the developing field, by which he appears to have been waiting to see if someone else would please show Republican viability so that he wouldn’t have to run.

Passivity reveals a lack of vital commitment. It’s about time for Baker to show some affirmative enthusiasm, if he has any.

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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.