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Candidate, run thyself Saturday, Apr 12, 2008 By Doug Thompson All four U.S. House of Representatives members from Arkansas got a pass from major party opposition this year. This includes 3rd District Rep. John Boozman of Rogers, the sole Republican. The Green Party will have a candidate in the 3rd, but Democrats won't. This lack of a party challenger to Boozman aggravates many Democrats in Northwest Arkansas. A popular blog called the lack of opposition a "failure of will and a lack of principle" and bitterly blamed the state Democratic Party for not recruiting a challenger. That's going too far. Democrats of the 3rd District don't sit around waiting for Little Rock to give permission to run. If leaving Boozman unchallenged was a failure, then the flop happened a lot closer to home than Democratic headquarters in Little Rock. I think every elected official ought to have a major party opponent in every election. I believe that a losing candidate still has the power to make good points, bring up issues and force the winner to address them. I think a campaign gets elected officials out into the public. When none of that happens, I get annoyed too. However, I ask what went wrong before laying on blame. Being an equal opportunity basher, I'm going to point out that the Republicans failed to get a Senate candidate or any House candidates except their incumbent. So Republicans lose the Arkansas House of Representatives challenger recruiting sweepstakes 3 to 1. Democrat Mike Hathorn ran in the 3rd District's 2001 special election, which was the first time Boozman ran. The race was an open seat in what was universally agreed to be the Democrats' best shot since Bill Clinton ran for the seat. Hathorn lost. Then state Rep. Jan Judy of Fayetteville ran. She lost. Then Woody Anderson ran with Iraq War backlash and Republican scandals in Congress were at their height. He lost. Here we are in 2008. It gets clearer every day that a 3rd District Democrat probably won't have Sen. Hillary Clinton's coattails and presidential campaign organization to ride. In fact, Boozman may have Sen. John McCain's. The polls we have and the election trends of years indicate that Arkansas could go for McCain rather than Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, without surprising anybody. Nobody's volunteering for a political suicide mission. Why are people so upset about that? Well, a big factor is that Boozman is on the wrong side of the Iraq War as far as many Democrats are concerned. Too bad for them; Voters in the 3rd District know there's a war on in Iraq. They don't need anybody's political challenge to remind them. Many have friends and family over there. Plenty have friends and family who aren't coming back. So why isn't this a bigger issue? Here's my suggestion: Because those of us who don't wear the uniform or don't have close friends or family over there sacrifice nothing. I've said for years that I oppose the war in Iraq. I said that before that war started. However, I've also said I'll accept gas rationing and a general tax increase if we insist on staying in. Friday I read a "National Journal" column that quotes a book I'm going to read. Author Robert Hormats wrote "Price of Liberty" on how the United States finances its wars. The column quotes the book as saying that Iraq/Afghanistan "is the first major war where we have cut taxes ... and it is the first major war where we have increased domestic ... spending rather than cut it. As a result, the entire incremental cost of the war has been borrowed." The war costs $10.3 billion a month. The column goes on: "New taxes paid for one-quarter of the costs of the Civil War, for one-third of World War I's costs, and for nearly half of World War II's. Even when confronted with the unprecedented expense of those titanic wars, our leaders 'had a very keen sense of not imposing inordinate burdens on posterity,' says Hormats, now a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs." Significantly, Vietnam was last time we paid for a war "painlessly" with borrowing and while increasing domestic spending. That one also went on too long, with too little public attention, debate and oversight until it became bitterly divisive. Even then, we finally passed a tax increase in 1968. The only time in U.S. history, according to the column, that we didn't increase taxes for a major war was when we fought Mexico in 1846. Considering that we got Texas (whose independence was contested by Mexico), California, Nevada, Utah, the bulk of Arizona and considerable portions of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming out of that war, I'd say even that one was a budget plus in the short to mid-term. So here we are now in a war vital to our security and to preventing chaos in the Middle East, supposedly. Sounds like something worth paying for, doesn't it? Only if the reasons are true. --------- Doug Thompson is a Fayetteville-based reporter and columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau and the Morning News. His e-mail address is dthompson@arkansasnews.com. |
