By John Brummett

This looming U.S. Senate race of ours grows more curious, at least regarding the Republicans.

Out-of-state labor union groups working through a nonprofit political organization are buying Arkansas television ads to attack as a liberal big-spender the supposed frontrunner of the now-eight Republican primary candidates, state Sen. Gilbert Baker of Conway.

Presumably the thinking is that Baker, something of a political talent who has had regional success winning conservative Democratic votes, would be the Republican field’s strongest general election candidate. One way to try to pre-empt his becoming that nominee would be to spend money mischievously telling Arkansas Republicans that he’s the one thing they can’t abide — a blooming liberal.

It’s a laughable and absurd and cynical contention, of course. It’s an abomination, actually, for liberal Democratic groups to try to influence a Republican primary by calling the Republican whom they most fear the thing they actually would prefer him to be, but which they know good and well he isn’t.

Of course I once encouraged Democrats to vote in a Republican primary to take out Tommy Robinson, so maybe I can’t talk.

There was greater nobility in that, I’d assert.

Baker fell in with a band of conservative Democrats several years ago to take over the state Senate and divide money for local pork-barrel spending. But there’s no liberalism, just good legislating, in Baker’s routing surplus money to his local state college in Conway and, in turn, getting a rare Republican loftiness as chairman of the Joint Budget Committee.

Meantime, it might now be that Baker is no longer the presumptive frontrunner or the most formidable-looking general election candidate in the Republican field.

I used the hyphenated modifier “now-eight” in the second paragraph to present the candidates in the Republican field.

That’s just up from seven.

Stanley Reed, the Marianna farmer and lawyer who has done stints as chairman of the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees and president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau, and as a Democrat, now says he’s definitely in the Republican race.

He has money and establishment credentials and, I’m told, genuine intellectual conservatism. But we can’t know what kind of political candidate he’ll make. Nor can we know whether Arkansas Republican primary voters will embrace a man who lives all the way across the state from the Republican hotbed and who has given money in the past to U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln.

Reed does have a connection in the GOP nest of northwestern Arkansas. A close friend and key supporter is Jim Lindsey of Fayetteville, the real estate mogul and former football star who was a colleague on the UA Board and who, in fact, tried to pull a fast one and get Reed installed as the UA president. That association might help Reed. It might not.

Reed was saying only a few months ago that he couldn’t imagine running against Lincoln because of all she’d done for Arkansas agriculture. Since then she’s become chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

There was a time — just the other day, in fact — when a big East Arkansas farmer would have thrown a fund-raiser for the Senate agriculture chairman, not announced his intention to try to take her seat.

Reed says this election is about more than agriculture and that Lincoln is vulnerable because of her own waffling and because the national Democratic agenda had wounded her irreparably by association.

I should relate at this point that Lincoln entered a statement of praise for Reed into the congressional record upon his retirement as president of the Farm Bureau.

So the characters are getting into place for what could be an interesting narrative.

And I haven’t even mentioned reports that Lt. Gov. Bill Halter met with out-of-state liberals the other day to talk about his possibly running against Lincoln in the Democratic primary. These are not the same liberals who unveiled the attack ad on Baker, apparently.

Actually, now that I think about it, state Sen. Bob Johnson of Bigelow, the conservative Democrat with whom Baker allied to take over the Senate and divvy up money for pork, is still pending on record as saying he’s considering running.

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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.