Room in the tent

Just because Republicans are determined to enable a human disgrace as president and take health insurance from millions does not mean Democrats are in a strong position to make substantial gains.

At least Republicans are allied on something, meaning the mass pretense that Trump is a serious man and serious president.

Democrats are torn on just about everything—on Bernie Sanders, on single-payer health insurance, on whether a pro-choice position is required for party legitimacy and on whether it was Hillary Clinton’s fault she didn’t appeal to working people or working people’s fault that they voted against their own interests.

The other night a one-time leading Democratic moderate, former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, said in a television interview that Trump—even Trump—could propose a practical revision of Obamacare that would work and get 30 votes from each side of the aisle. It would thus pass while, as Kerrey put it, isolating 20 of the unreasonable extremists on each side.

That was one day after a piece appeared in the New York Times about cheering supporters at a Bernie Sanders rally proclaiming single-payer government health insurance or bust as the Democratic mantra—the only acceptable one— for 2018.

You’d think a person could be permitted to embrace practical revisions to Obamacare realistically and remain in a party with people who advocate single-payer utopianly.

Meanwhile, in Arkansas, beleaguered Democrats have a few interesting candidates turning up as midterm challengers or potential challengers to the state’s abysmally Trump-attached, health-care-destroying Republican congressional delegation.

Yet I see sniping—not about resisting the affront that is Trump and saving and improving health insurance. It’s on whether the emerging candidates are uniformly and thoroughly acceptable to someone’s idea of what a real Democrat must be.

Paul Spencer is a veteran teacher at Little Rock Catholic High who believes strongly in causes. In the last few years he has emerged as a crusader against the obscene influence of money on our state and national politics and for specific ethics reform initiatives. He has dared to try to make a difference.

Now he ponders a Democratic candidacy for Congress in the 2nd District of Central Arkansas. His would be a race offering outsider genuineness. His personal history would make the race about something beyond the usual talking points encompassing the disgrace of Trump generally and Republican health-care plans specifically.

But word has gone out disapprovingly in some Democratic quarters that he personally holds an anti-abortion position.

He has said, though, that he wouldn’t use his seat among a hundred in the U.S. House of Representatives to work to repeal Roe v.

Wade. He has said he would vote for “Medicare for all” that included Planned Parenthood funding.

The problem is that many liberal Democrats, retrenching after national and state defeat, have sought to make the least impurity on a woman’s right to choose a Democratic disqualifier in most of the country if perhaps not Arkansas.

It’s easy for me to lament that kind of penalizing and polarizing litmus test. I have always held the advantage of white maleness. I am not pregnant, least of all from rape or incest.

But I can’t help but see Paul Spencer as an admirable potential candidate who would bring worthy sensibilities to this candidacy.

Meantime, from deep southeastern Arkansas, a cattle farmer and businessman named Mike Nelson has declared his Democratic candidacy against Rick Crawford in the 1st District. He says the House Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare is a “piece of junk,” which is as well as the assessment can be put absent profanity.

But Nelson also says he is concerned about “political correctness” and the lack of respect for free speech on college campuses.

As it happens, I ran across on social media a post from Glen Hooks, head of the Sierra Club in Arkansas, attaching a photograph of that immediately preceding quote on political correctness from a newspaper article, and declaring: “I’ll say it again. In a race between a real Republican and a fake Republican, the real one wins every time.”

He was calling Nelson, the Democratic candidate, a “fake Republican” for thinking people ought to be able to say what they want on college campuses.

I’m not sure that Democrats, especially considering what they’re up against in Arkansas, should so restrict admission to their candidate tent that they exclude people who advocate tolerance of free speech.

Yes, hate speech is hurtful and cancerous on our culture. But the proper responses in a free society are within a range—from ignoring healthily to resisting passionately to defeating not with pre-emptive intolerance but with nobler and louder speech.

You’d think—wouldn’t you?—that a man could be a Democrat and, in the matter of free speech, engage in it, permit it, ignore it, resist it and defeat it.