On the homepage, I’ve got a profile of Tom Cotton, a candidate for the Republican nomination in Arkansas’s 4th congressional district. Yesterday, Cotton announced that he raised $342,000 in the third quarter, during which he was active for two months. (He declared his candidacy in August.) It’s a new record: the most an Arkansas candidate — Republican or Democrat, incumbent or challenger — has ever raised in his first quarter. Currently, Cotton has $331,000 in cash on hand.
I interviewed Cotton a week ago and asked him about some subjects I couldn’t fit into the piece. I was particularly interested in his views on foreign policy, because Cotton, an Army reservist, served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He says Iran “cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon,” and “there can be stiffer sanctions” to prevent that danger from developing. He also notes that the Sunni kingdoms of the Middle East — Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, etc. — fear a nuclear Iran. They may make for some strange bedfellows, he surmises.
On the Palestinian question, Cotton avers, “We should always support Israel, one of our two special allies in world” (the other being Britain, of course). “We shouldn’t be pressuring Israel to make concessions that will be harmful to its national interest.” The Palestinians need to “quit trucking with terrorists” and guarantee Israel’s existence before a two-state solution can be reached.
Finally, Cotton supports Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed entitlement reforms. On Social Security, for instance, he believes “we need to honor our commitments to current retirees, but for people in our generation [he’s 34], I think we do need to move to a mixture of the traditional system and personal investments accounts.”
In the profile, Cotton discusses Afghanistan, immigration, farm subsidies, and more. Read the whole thing here.