OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: The Tom Cotton bridge – Arkansas Online

Tom Cotton thought it was a big deal, and perhaps it was in the vicinity, even if Mike Pence had already blazed the path.

It was Cotton's turn to speak in the "Time for Choosing" series at the Reagan Presidential Library, which is showcasing potential Republican presidential candidates for 2024 or beyond.

He leaked ahead of time a key element of his prepared remarks and linked on social media the address by which we could all watch Monday evening.

He was introduced as "courageous" by the director of the library, who extolled the fortuitous timing of hearing from such an important voice with world events in great unrest.

Mostly Cotton delivered standard loathing. He blamed Joe Biden's debacle in Afghanistan for Vladimir Putin's inhumanity in Ukraine. He said we need to put more people, not fewer, in prison. He said we need to teach positive themes in school, not anti-American ones.

But here was his nut graph, the element of his 45-minute address about which he'd provided advance notice and by which he was seeking to fashion a political place for himself and a new political positioning for his party: The Republican Party need not choose between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan, but walk the bridge that naturally spans them, which is an American populism in the frontier spirit of Andrew Jackson, who championed the common man against elitists.

Last June, Pence took his turn in this cattle call of Republican wannabes and broke the ground that Cotton plowed. The former vice president said in his speech that Reagan and Trump were similar "disrupters" at a time disruption was vital.

Cotton went further and was instantly ridiculed, of course, from the left. The scoffing came to a great extent from people who weren't alive or old enough to experience the deep liberal 1980s scorn for Reagan, for the extreme conservatism of a product of the entertainment industry who attracted working class-voters--Reagan Democrats, they were called--and co-opted Southern religious evangelicals even though he was divorced and didn't go to church himself.

Does that sound like anyone else? Sure. It sounds like Trump.

The difference in the men and their presidencies is not policy or theme. It's entirely personal style. That and insurrection, which still goes to personal style.

Reagan beheld an America in decline and eloquently extolled a new morning in that shining city on a hill. Then he cut taxes for rich people and nominated conservative judges.

Trump beheld an America in decline and darkly proclaimed a dystopian land from which only he could make America great again. And then cut taxes for rich people and nominated conservative judges.

Reagan was affable and a friend of the Democratic House speaker assigned him. Trump was an egomaniacal madman who spoke derisively of any political figure who crossed him.

Reagan was friendly with his Soviet counterpart but told him to "tear down this wall" and vowed to trust him, but verify. Trump was enamored of and subservient to his infinitely worse Russian counterpart.

Reagan got re-elected by a landslide. Trump got wiped out for re-election by women and educated suburbanites who disapproved of his style, not his policies and not his theme of capturing the old Reagan Democrats with anti-elite populism.

Cotton was seeking to outline a political formulation acceptable in its extreme conservatism to Trump's base but less behaviorally unacceptable to moderates who are looking for something they can tolerate as a counter to impractical new Democratic progressivism and ineptitude.

He has a glimmer of credibility in the matter, having advised and stood by Trump but breaking with him by telling the obvious truth that there was no way Congress could do anything with the report of the Electoral College other than rubber-stamp it.

Cotton's speech essentially was proposing: How about a Reagan-Trump blend? How about me in that context, harsh like Trump but not as insanely insurrectionist, and solidly conservative like Reagan but more modern than to make nice with any Democratic speaker of the House, not that we'll have one much longer?

The junior senator's campaign theme for 2024 might be "dystopian, but not full-on nuts."

While tactically onto something, Cotton was hardly bold. If he wanted to champion a truly meaningful contemporary Republican bridge, he would propose one spanning Trump and Liz Cheney. Or Dick Cheney. Or Mitt Romney. Or George W. Bush.

But that may be beyond the scope of modern engineering.

Anyway, Cotton and Republican strategists calculate that, in the way things seem to be going, spanning and getting between Trump's madness and Reagan's memory ought to suffice against Biden and the current band of congressional Democrats.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: The Tom Cotton bridge - Arkansas Online