By John Brummett

There’s an abundance of bankruptcy in the 1st District congressional race of eastern Arkansas.

You have the personal finances from 16 years ago of farm radio man Rick Crawford, the Republican nominee. Then you have the dearth of ideas, reason and relevance in the ongoing dialogue between Crawford and the Democratic nominee, Marion Berry protégé Chad Causey.

Crawford, parroting the Republican line for the mid-term elections, declared that we must stop running up this federal spending deficit because people would go to jail if they did their personal finances that way.

Uh, oh.

It subsequently came out that, while he hadn’t gone to jail, Crawford actually had filed personal bankruptcy in 1994 over about $12,000 in debts, about $7,000 on a credit card and about $5,000 in medical charges to a Missouri hospital.

Then Crawford asserted that he’d settled all these debts, although he could not, or would not, prove it. He authorized a reporter to confirm with the Missouri hospital that his balance was now zero. But he wouldn’t authorize the Missouri hospital to say when the payment was made. It could have been paid the day before. The balance could have been zeroed-out by the bankruptcy.

So I figured Crawford was rendered politically lifeless by these developments (the bankruptcy plus the clumsy obfuscation). But it turned out that the Bubbas of eastern Arkansas are so distressed about President Obama and Democrats that Talk Business and Hendrix College took a poll and it showed Crawford with a 16-point lead.

This is most unusual in the historical sense. Until days ago, this was a safe Democratic region, represented by no Republican in Congress since Reconstruction.

It served to so unglue the Causey campaign that it did what all campaigns do when an independent media poll shows them doing poorly. Causey’s camp released a supposedly “internal” poll, meaning its own, and it showed, presto, that Causey was doing much better than the other poll said.

But even this poll had Causey down by a point. I will never understand why a campaign wouldn’t show itself ahead 100-0 in whatever “internal” poll it managed to talk a couple of bloggers into publishing.

Not only that, but the Causey campaign was so without bearings that it released some of its strategic and tactical thinking about how to attack Crawford.

The first point was that Crawford couldn’t connect with the people of eastern Arkansas because he graduated from high school in New Hampshire.

Uh, oh.

The very first line of Crawford’s biography at his website, which presumably the Causey people would have read, revealed that he was raised in a military family and that his dad moved around a lot because of that, including to New Hampshire where he finished high school.

So you know what happened next, surely.

Wholly predictably, the Crawford campaign accused Causey of attacking Crawford as an “Army brat,” of, in fact, attacking our nation’s military people.

By the next day, three national veterans advocacy groups had assailed Causey for this outrageous affront to our brave fighting men and women.

Gabe Holmstrom, a campaign operative for Causey, pointed out that the material released by Causey also cited as one of Crawford’s vulnerabilities that he had filed for bankruptcy and lied about it.

It’s interesting, Holmstrom asserted, that Crawford had defended himself on the New Hampshire residency charge but not on the lying charge.

It was a point to score for Causey’s side, but one quickly negated when I asked Holmstrom if Vic Snyder, a Democrat, had been a failed congressman for the 2nd District on account of his having come not from around here, but from Oregon.

All he could think to say was that none of this had anything to do with Vic Snyder.

It doesn’t have anything to do with anything, actually.

——-
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.