Here’s what Senator Mark Pryor (D., Ark.) had to say about Representative Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), his opponent in his reelection campaign:
“There’s a lot of people in the Senate that didn’t serve in the military,” Pryor told NBC News. “Obviously in the Senate we have all types of different people, all kinds of different folks that have come from all types of different backgrounds-and I think that’s part of that sense of entitlement that he gives off is that, almost like, I served my country, let me into the Senate. But that’s not how it works in Arkansas.”
Pryor has been down in the polls for a while now, and this won’t help. The quote reminded me of Governor Ann Richards’s remarks in her own reelection race in Texas in 1994:
You just work like a dog, do well, the test scores are up, the kids are looking better, the dropout rate is down. And all of a sudden, you’ve got some jerk who’s running for public office telling everybody it’s all a sham and it isn’t real and he doesn’t give you credit for doing your job. So far as he is concerned, everything in Texas is terrible.
That was the moment, I read somewhere, that George W. Bush knew he had won. (Pryor’s remark is of course worse than Richards’s was.)