LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Go to the campaign website of struggling Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, and you’ll be greeted with a photo of Pryor’s Republican opponent, Republican Rep. Tom Cotton, gazing down at you, with the headline ‘Superior Tom: After climbing the ladder of opportunity, Tom Cotton looks down on Arkansans.”
The phrase “Superior Tom” is derived, apparently, from a recent profile of Cotton by the Atlantic’s Molly Ball. In “The Making of a Conservative Superstar,” Ball unearthed Cotton’s senior thesis at Harvard. Ball wrote that the thesis, which was an essay on the Federalist Papers, “provides a window into a political candidate who is otherwise something of a cipher” and could help observers pierce Cotton’s “air of impenetrability” and his “blankness.”
The insight that Ball finds in Cotton’s thesis is his belief, or at least his belief as a college senior, that men who strive to win national leadership positions are often smart and ambitious. Such men have “a superior intelligence compared to the unambitious and to the lesser ambitious,” Cotton wrote in the brief portion of the thesis quoted by Ball. Ball notes that Cotton did not equate such ambition and intelligence with wisdom, but argued, to quote again from the college-age Cotton, “it does imply some amount of sheer, raw brainpower. National officeholders will all possess something akin to shrewdness, cleverness, or perhaps even cunning.”
From this, and from examining the 37 year-old Cotton’s brief voting record in Congress, Ball concluded that he has a “rigidly idealistic persona” and a “starkly moralistic worldview” that he has “exhibited since he was an undergraduate.” Cotton’s is a “harsh, unyielding, judgmental political philosophy, one that makes little allowance for compassion or human weakness.”
With that analysis in hand, the Pryor campaign has fashioned “Superior Tom.” “Cotton argued national officeholders like himself have ‘superior intelligence,’ ” the website proclaims. “Cotton says his success is because of his ‘superior intelligence.’ But the fact is … he got a chance — a chance he’d deny others.” The site goes on to slam Cotton for various votes he has taken on student loans, suggesting he would deny others the assistance he received, in the form of Stafford loans, when he attended Harvard.
The not-so underlying message of the Pryor attack is a political consultant’s version of Ball’s article: Tom Cotton thinks he’s better than you, and he wouldn’t stop for a minute to help you if you needed it.
During a ride on Cotton’s campaign RV Saturday, I asked him about “Superior Tom.” He said he hadn’t seen it. “I don’t frequent Mark Pryor’s website,” Cotton told me. (He should; it has much more about Tom Cotton than about Mark Pryor.) From there, Cotton moved quickly to adapt his standard talking points to a new line of attack. “The person who clearly thinks he knows better than most Arkansans is Mark Pryor, since he votes with Barack Obama 93 percent of the time,” Cotton said. “He didn’t listen to Arkansans when they told him overwhelmingly not to support Obamacare and he had it in his power to stop it. I don’t know many Arkansans who agree with Barack Obama 93 percent of the time, so Mark Pryor is not listening to Arkansans and thinks he knows better than they do.”
But what about the real message of the Pryor ad, the accusation that Cotton thinks he’s better than all those ordinary voters out there? “I’m very happy that I’ve had a chance to campaign for this race,” Cotton began. He continued:
It was a pretty well-calibrated response: a touch of humility, a mention of his military service, and a nice Clintonian turn toward the future. And, of course, it didn’t address the substance of Cotton’s senior thesis, which in any event isn’t even close to being an issue in the campaign.
But one more thing. Of course, Cotton wouldn’t ever discuss it in the context of a campaign, but what about the idea that some leaders actually are superior? Not in the eyes of God, or the law, but as leaders? People look at Cotton, from a small town in Arkansas, and see a man who went to Harvard, then to Harvard Law, and then, after graduation, with a very valuable degree in his pocket, joined the U.S. Army to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan — not as a lawyer, but as a combat leader. That’s quite an achievement. It’s not at all unusual for people to look up to someone like that, and it doesn’t mean he is looking down on them. (Cotton’s achievement is of special relevance in the current Senate race, because his opponent comes from an Arkansas political family, with some voters seeing him as coasting on his name.)
In the end, big achievers achieve. The most famous Arkansas politician of them all, Bill Clinton, came from absolutely nothing — broken family, no money, no connections — to become President of the United States. That’s an extraordinary accomplishment. In Cotton, Arkansans have someone who might become another national leader. It’s nothing to look down on.
