By John Brummett

Bud Jackson, speaking by phone from Alexandria, Va., said my questioning struck him as provincial and irrelevant.

How did Lt. Gov. Bill Halter come to have as his day-to-day campaign spokesman for his U.S. Senate bid a hired political consultant residing distantly elsewhere?

How did Halter come to use this Bud Jackson as his hatchet man issuing news releases quoting himself waging a quickly tiresome war of typed words with Blanche Lincoln’s campaign manager and designated hatchet man, Steve Patterson?

Jackson said Patterson himself comes originally from Oklahoma.

Yes, but Patterson has lived and worked in Little Rock for several years and at least he issues his typed words of war from an office in the train station in Little Rock where Lincoln maintains headquarters for her campaign, which Patterson presumably runs on site.

Jackson, who fell in with Halter in Halter’s run for lieutenant governor four years ago, said that Lincoln’s media consultant has offices right down the street there in Alexandria.

Yes, but that media consultant is not a surrogate day-to-day spokesman for designated ongoing hatchetry against the opponent while the candidate seeks to behave as if pristine, as one beloved by his old high school football coach and delightedly bagging groceries for seniors.

Anyway, a race for a seat in the U.S. Senate is necessarily provincial, isn’t it? It’s provincial by definition, I mean.

Arkansas is the province from which this delegate to the U.S. Senate will be chosen. Each state is a province getting two senators that it picks of its own peculiar volition, according to the special needs or interests of the state, or province.

This is why a senator from Arkansas would care more about soybean farming and a senator from Wisconsin would care more about dairy farming.

As for relevance, this Halter venture is somewhat unconventional in that he was lured into this race — and is now prominently funded in it — by, or through, national liberal and labor groups.

This is a national Democratic factional struggle between liberals and centrists with Arkansas only so happening to supply the battleground.

Thus Halter’s entire campaign essence is appropriate for exploration as to whether it is about Arkansas first or for broader national interests first.

Yes, whether Lincoln’s campaign is more about big corporate special interests than the people of Arkansas also is an appropriate subject for voter exploration.

As I have said before, both could well be true.

My fatigue is mainly with this surrogate crossfire going on day-to-day in news releases out of one campaign quoting Jackson attacking Lincoln and out of the other campaign quoting Patterson attacking Halter.

The latest has Patterson saying Halter is going negative in a cowardly way by letting national labor unions attack Lincoln for him (himself attacking Halter in behalf of the presumably cowardly Lincoln) and Jackson countering that Lincoln is untruthful because she’s taken labor union money over the years.

I don’t give a flip-fly what Jackson or Patterson says. I’m interested in what Lincoln and Halter have to say.

So let’s have a debate.

Let’s see if Lincoln and Halter can find time to talk directly to and about each other.

They’ll have to get out of the television studio where they are merely play-acting as self-styled heroes in an ongoing TV series — Halter as a grocery-bagger and Lincoln as one tough lady and the only grown-up in a romper room of wild children.

Oh, by the way: Jackson says the Halter campaign will probably hire an in-house spokesman soon. Presumably then Patterson will have some other counterpart to play this game of news release warfare.

Further, Lincoln did a little talking for herself in a campaign commercial unveiled Tuesday in which she accuses Halter by name of going negative although the negativity against her to which she refers actually came in a so-called “independent” TV spot from a national labor union.

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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.