The Kochs are at it again. That's a new ad their Americans For Prosperity group is running in Arkansas to try to shore up Rep. Tom Cotton's
flagging campaign. Note the reliance on bucolic images of life on the farm in Arkansas, the kind of life the ad tells us that Cotton is trying to protect from Washington, D.C.
Cotton, the ad says, voted against "red tape" for farmers. That apparently means, in Koch speak, voting against the farm bill, which Arkansas voters aren't so happy about.
"Explain your farm bill vote. We keep getting questions about that," Susan Childs, a Garland County Republican Party official, asked Cotton in Hot Springs during a swing by the local GOP victory headquarters.
Cotton, the only one of Arkansas's five GOP legislators to vote against it, replied that Democrats had called it a farm bill to "mislead the voters" and should have called it the "food stamp bill."
(Because no one in Arksansas requires food assistance, apparently. Never mind that the state
ranks number 1 in hunger among seniors.)
Cotton's "no" vote on the farm bill, and his "aye" vote on the most crazy extreme budget to hit the House floor ever—the one that privatizes Medicare and would make people wait until they're 70 to get it and Social Security—have an awful lot to do with his poor polling performance in Arkansas. No amount of golden sunlit picture of cornfields in Koch ads is going to make up for the fact that Cotton voted against what matters to Arkansans.