POLITICS
Home and Campaigning Lure Bill Clinton to Arkansas
During a recent visit to Arkansas, former PresidentBill Clinton took issue with a news story that implied he has been returning to his home state lately only because of the midterm elections.
He ticked off some recent visits. “I buried two cousins and one of my mother’s best friends this year. I’m about to go to my 50th high school reunion. I hate it, but I am,” Mr. Clinton said.”
“I love my native state,” he told a crowd at a political rally. “Without you, I never would have had a chance to do anything.”
While Mr. Clinton’s affection for his state seems genuine, he is also determined to preserve his political legacy there. If Senator Mark Pryor, the last Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, loses, it would strike a potentially fatal blow to the Clinton-style Arkansas Democrats whose moderate politics and personal charisma have allowed them to transcend party, even as other states steadily abandoned the Democratic Party.
On Sunday, Mr. Clinton will return to Arkansas for the sixth time since April to make a final push for a Democratic ticket packed with old friends. Locals said the last time he campaigned this hard, his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was on the ballot.
Mr. Clinton tacked on a final Arkansas swing to his packed pre-Election Day schedule, with stops in rural areas of the state where turnout of white working-class and black voters could make a critical difference.
“After his wife’s campaign I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Paul Neaville, a Democratic operative from Arkansas who worked on the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1996. “He’s making his own campaign schedule at this point,” Mr. Neaville added.
Mr. Clinton rose to prominence amid the state’s traditions and retail politics, a New Democrat who made his polices palatable by delivering them through a folksy, gun-toting relatability.
“He is coming home to people he knows and a state he loves,” said Vincent Insalaco, the state Democratic Party chairman.
But centrist Arkansas Democrats like Mr. Clinton, Gov. Mike Beebe, the state’s popular Democratic governor, and Mr. Pryor’s father, David Pryor, a longtime senator and former governor, appear to be an endangered species teetering on the brink of extinction ahead of Tuesday’s election.
“This whole state was historically Democratic,” said Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark. Mr. Clinton “is just trying to stop the bleeding.”
Republicans, meanwhile, are doing their part to associate the Democratic ticket with President Obama, rather than Mr. Clinton, who remains popular in his home state. “We’re not bothered by President Clinton’s support of Senator Pryor,” said David Ray, a spokesman for Representative Tom Cotton, Mr. Pryor’s Republican opponent. “What bothers us is Senator Pryor’s support of President Obama.”
Supporters of Mr. Pryor, who has been running slightly behind Mr. Cotton, are hoping the former president’s presence will send a message that the race is not lost.
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On Sunday, Mr. Clinton will do an “Arkansas Victory 2014” tour with get-out-the-vote rallies in Texarkana, Blytheville, West Memphis and Fort Smith, where turnout of black and rural white voters could help Mr. Pryor edge out a come-from-behind victory.
“Bill Clinton is one of the smartest people you’ve ever met, and he goes where the action is,” said Bob Edwards, a Little Rock lawyer and Mr. Pryor’s campaign treasurer. “If he thought this race wasn’t winnable, he’d go help someone else.”
Last month, Mr. Clinton headlined events in Hot Springs, Hope, North Little Rock, Pine Bluff, Forrest City and West Memphis. “He ain’t letting Ark. go without a fight,” tweeted John Brummett, a local columnist and author of “High Wire: From the Back Roads to the Beltway, the Education of Bill Clinton.”
In the governor’s race, Mike Ross, the Democrat hoping to succeed Mr. Beebe, who must leave office because of term limits, trails his Republican rival, Asa Hutchinson, 44 percent to 47 percent, according to an NBC News/Marist poll of likely voters conducted Oct. 19 to 23.
(Adding another personal connection to the race, Mr. Ross served as Mr. Clinton’s driver in his 1982 race for governor, and Mr. Hutchinson, a former congressman, helped lead the fight to impeach Mr. Clinton in 1998.)
After Mrs. Clinton, who appears on the verge of a 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Clinton has been the most in-demand Democratic surrogate in an election year when Mr. Obama’s name is an epithet, particularly in the South.
Although Mr. Clinton has not lived in Arkansas since he moved to the White House in 1993, he has maintained deep ties there. Some 62 percent of voters in Arkansas have a favorable opinion of him, while only 34 percent approve of Mr. Obama, according to NBC News/Marist polls.
Mrs. Clinton does not draw the same affection from Arkansas voters: 49 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion of her, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll. Mrs. Clinton hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Pryor in New York but has not included Arkansas on her packed schedule of midterm events.
By Tuesday, Mr. Clinton will have made multiple visits to help Democrats in Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, Maryland, Connecticut and Michigan. In addition to the Arkansas swing, he plans to spend the final days before the election helping the Senate candidates Michelle Nunn in Georgia, Kay Hagan in North Carolina and Bruce Braley in Iowa and the Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, Charlie Crist.
In Arkansas, Mr. Clinton often tacks on midterm events and fund-raisers to previously scheduled commitments like a speech at the Southern Governors’ Association. The former president also prefers to sleep at his residence at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center while campaigning in nearby states.
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