Tolbert: Cotton Wins Debate, While Pryor Drops The Ball

Tuesday night saw a real debate in the U.S. Senate debate.

The one-on-one format gave Arkansans the chance to compare both of the main party candidates side-by-side and Republican challenger Cong. Tom Cotton clearly came out the winner with Sen. Mark Pryor clumsily trying to deliver oppo research and dropping the ball on some relatively easy answers.

Pryor shot right out of the gate in his opening statement with his oppo delivery repeating a claim he made a week ago in an interview with the Saline Courier that Cotton took a “Fed-Ex box filled with campaign donation checks.”  He continued this theme throughout the night saying Cotton was indebted to his “billionaire backers” and referring to an audio tape from a fundraising event led by conservative backers.

These type of attacks are typical for political press releases, but are awkward under the bright lights of a debate.  It ignores the hundreds of thousands Pryor has taken from lobbyists (ranking third among incumbents) and liberals who support his campaign.  The fact that conservatives give to Cotton and liberals give to Pryor should not surprise anyone and is not worthy of an incumbent Senator’s primary line of attack during a debate. But Pryor stuck with it.

It did not take Pryor long to stumble badly on a relatively easy question regarding how he would define the middle class.

“Under the law, there are lots of definitions of middle class, but when I think of the middle class I think of most of Arkansas maybe that goes up to $150,000 to $200,000. There are different ways to judge it,” said Pryor.  On follow up, Pryor repeated this definition saying he thinks middle class goes “up to $200,000.”

The gaffe was so bad that the Republican communication team posted the video to YouTube within minutes – before the debate was even over. Cotton had no problem hitting this question out of the park on his rebuttal.

“Sen. Pryor must be the one who is hanging out with out-of-state billionaires if he thinks $200,000 in Arkansas is the middle class,” said Cotton.  “When I think about a typical household in Arkansas makes about $40,000 a year. Unfortunately, that is down by almost 5 percent over the last six years because of the Obama-Pryor economy.”

Pryor also struggled to defend his vote for Obamacare, in my opinion. At times, he wanted to take credit for the benefits of Obamacare but did not want to accept responsibilities for any of the harms the law has caused.  This was on display in his answer when asked about the workers for Wal-Mart who recently had their insurance cut due to the new regulations.

“Let me say what I would say to the Wal-Mart employees here in Arkansas is they now have an option and that is they have the Private Option,” said Pryor praising the Arkansas state Legislature who worked out a compromise to allow low income families to purchase private insurance using funds available through Obamacare for Medicaid expansion.

Again, this was a softball for Cotton to hit.

“Those workers at Wal-Mart lost their insurance and their premiums went up because of Obamacare – because Mark Pryor cast the deciding vote for Obamacare,” said Cotton. “This was not an unintended consequence of the law. This was very much the intended consequence of Obamacare, which is government-run health care.  They want people out of private insurance and on to government insurance.”

I thought Pryor also did a dismal job trying to sell himself as someone who votes against his party, which simply is not backed up by his voting record.

“I voted against the party line so many times I am always getting criticized by my Democrats,” said Pryor with a chuckle as he tried to present himself as a middle-of-the-road independent.

Of course, Cotton did not buy it.

“Mark Pryor says he votes in a bi-partisan way. I guess that is true if you consider voting with Barack Obama 93 percent of the time to be bi-partisan,” responded Cotton pointing to the often cited study by CQ Politics on Pryor’s Senate voting record.  “Time and time again he has put Barack Obama over the interests of Arkansas – casting a deciding vote for Obamacare, voting for a trillion dollars in new debt every single year.”

Although the race is close, Pryor is trailing in most polls with Real Clear Politics giving Cotton an average lead of 4.4 points.  The Rothenberg Political Report changed its rating this week from “toss up/tilts Republican” to “leans Republican.”

Pryor was in need of a game changer during this debate. He did not get it. Instead, Cotton stayed on message using Pryor’s record to tie him to Obama. By contrast, Pryor looked like a challenger instead of an incumbent clumsily trying and failing to deliver oppo research and dropping the ball on some easy questions that will stand out after the debate.