By John Brummett

A few e-mails poured in late in the week to alert me that U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor had said offensive things in a mid-week address to the Rogers Rotary Club.

I hadn’t been there, but I knew there had to have been some misunderstanding.

Pryor does not say offensive things. He says only mild, moderate, temperate, safe and mushy things, some of them nigh unto meaningless.

Indeed, a check with the senator’s staff indicated that all this had been a misunderstanding. Pryor hadn’t actually said anything, or at least he hadn’t intended to say anything.

A liberal blogger — well, a partisan Democratic one, that being a somewhat different thing — was irritated by a quote from the senator’s speech that appeared in the Northwest Arkansas local papers. It had Pryor saying that 45 percent of Americans do not pay taxes and that we cannot long endure such a situation if we are to have a fair tax code that produces sufficient revenue for our needs and takes the tightening squeeze off the middle class.

To say that nearly half of Americans pay not a cent in taxes, period — well, that would be a world-class misstatement. Nearly half would have to buy nothing at retail and no gasoline. Nearly half would have to get payroll checks with no Social Security and Medicare deductions.

Actually, Pryor was talking only about people who do not pay federal income taxes. Or at least that’s what his trusted aide, MIchael Teague, says. As to whether the senator was proposing to start charging some federal income tax to our now-exempted lowest earners, he didn’t exactly mean that either, according to Teague.

What he in fact had gone out of his way to stress, Teague said, was that he wanted to preserve the concept of progressive federal income taxation by which tax-rate burdens rise as income levels rise. And he made clear that some of those paying virtually no federal income taxes, after assorted tax deductions, credits and advantages, are thousands of millionaires.

Here, then, is what the senator came out for: lower tax rates for all of you in the great middle class; more taxes from millionaires now finagling the tax laws to get their taxes erased; general reform of the tax code to plug loopholes and include some uncertain continuation of tax relief for the lowest earners, and increased revenue generation from all of that to get the deficit down.

Does Pryor favor letting the Bush tax cuts expire on the highest incomes? Well, Teague couldn’t say on that. It might depend.

Meantime, another e-mailer, a Democrat in Northwest Arkansas, was highly agitated that Pryor had sounded from press reports like a doctrinaire Republican in this Rotary address, advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare while extolling a corporate giant like Wal-Mart as a generous federal taxpayer.

Yes, Pryor had told the Rogers Rotarians that we must cut spending and that Social Security and Medicare must sustain their fair share of reductions. But he thinks those can be made without much personal pain.

And he said that Republicans were wrong in saying spending cuts alone could repair our deficit, just as, yes, Democrats, he countered, were wrong in implying the sole panacea was higher taxes on rich people.

That’s not sounding like a Republican. It’s sounding like the demilitarized in-between.

The in-between is where our leaders need to be, as long as they are assertive and specific about it. Alas, Pryor is, as yet, neither assertive nor specific. He mostly cites and lauds conceptually the work of others — the president’s debt-reduction commission and the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Six, mainly.

Pryor lionized Wal-Mart, the local corporate power looming over his luncheon site, only in this context: By comparison to Wal-Mart, which pays a tax rate exceeding 30 percent, General Electric should not be able to avoid federal income taxation altogether.

Here, then, is a rule on thumb on our state’s senior senator: He is for nice stuff and against naughty stuff, unequivocally, and you should not believe anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.

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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.