By John Brummett

As I said on my Twitter thing the other day, this Bill Halter challenge to U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln in the Democratic primary energizes me.

It presumes to rewrite the old equation of Arkansas politics. It takes a couple of pieces on the chess board and permits you to move them in new and different directions. You get a rook that can go diagonally and you have yourself a whole new contest.

As I have already substantially explored: Arkansas politics traditionally is a peculiar, insular enterprise defying any national logic or application. Yet Halter runs brazenly against Lincoln on the coaxing of, and with fund-raising generated by, a nationwide liberal network that wants to use our state’s Senate seat as a relatively cheap focus for a fight for the soul of the modern Democratic Party.

Last week Halter appeared to be running on the MSNBC ticket. He was doing most of his campaigning on the shows of the two most unabashedly liberal MSNBC talking heads, Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow.

There might be a few hundred Arkansawyers tuning in to those shows, some by accident while cruising for Fox. But Halter needed this niche market because it linked with the kinds of people across the country going online to moveon.org, where there was an easy clickie by which you could supply your credit card number and send a donation straight to Halter’s campaign.

That’s all because Lincoln, being pragmatic and centrist and bipartisan, is so thoroughly detested on those accounts by this unyielding left extreme.

Halter intends to run on this MSNBC ticket until he has several million dollars from out of state in the bank, after which he will commence using that money to explain to us that he is a bona fide Arkie and a champion of our weary working man whereas Blanche is the candidate of corporatists and such.

It’s not either-or, you know. He can be a tool of national liberal extremists and she can be a tool of corporations.

Here’s another curious dynamic: The hot currency right now is being a Washington outsider. So Halter tries to emphasize at once that he’s a veteran of the Clinton administration with expertise in Social Security and that he’s the outsider.

Halter intends to present himself as a Scott Brownish outsider, complete with the pickup truck that he drove to the Capitol for his filing and insisted to me that he’d owned for six years, which, I’m quite sure, is true.

Lincoln is even more creative. After 12 years in the U.S. Senate, she unveiled a TV spot Thursday presenting herself as the all-Arkie outsider fighting those childish numbskulls in D.C.

Finally, there’s this: Arkansas politics has always been a cult of personality in which we favor candidates because they are likable even if we might not agree with them philosophically. Bumpers, Pryor, Clinton. You know.

So how shall I say this? Let me do so delicately: I don’t find many people who like Halter. The only Halter buddy coming to mind, altogether oddly, is Jim Keet, the new Republican candidate for governor.

Want to see Mike Beebe’s face scrunch up? Walk up to him and say, “Bill Halter.”

Most of the state’s establishment Democrats see Halter as cold, audacious, imperious, arrogant and presumptuous, breezing back into the state as he did a couple of years ago to spend his personal wealth on political office and explain to us that he, being a Rhodes Scholar and all, is smarter than we are, a transformational rather than merely transactional figure, and that, without him, we’d never have had sense enough to tap our suckers for the easy money of a lottery to help our kids go to college.

I know Bill appreciates my delicacy.

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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.