The College Fix

Is Tom Cotton a true conservative? Depends on who you ask. National Review has called Arkansas Senate candidate Cotton a “Republican’s Dream.” Many view the Harvard-educated Cotton as a genuine threat to unseat Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor, and as a future star in the GOP.

But recently Cotton’s political beliefs during his days at Harvard have become an issue in the campaign, prompting some to question whether he’s a true conservative. Charles C. Johnson raised the issue in an article for The Daily Caller:

In a twice-weekly column for the Harvard Crimson, Cotton — who has been called a “Republican’s dream” by National Review and an “extraordinary figure” by the Weekly Standard — criticized politicians for not doing enough to oppose tobacco and wrote a laudatory 1996 piece praising Bill and Hillary Clinton…

Meanwhile, Joel Pollack of Breitbart.com has come to Cotton’s defense, criticizing Johnson’s article:

Johnson hones in on arguments Cotton made against drinking and smoking, and libertarianism in general. He cites these as deviations from conservative philosophy, as if Cotton were arguing against the inviolability of individual rights. In fact, Cotton was arguing from a deep-seated conservatism–one that views education as a means for imposing society’s rules and values on each successive generation, and college as the culmination of that process…

Johnson also strains to paint Cotton as a supporter of Bill Clinton, and especially Hillary Clinton, for having praised their political skills. To that end, Johnson twists Cotton’s comments about Hillary: he was praising her relative to her husband, not on her own merits. Actually, Cotton’s columns about the Clintons reveal a key trait of his conservatism: he puts principles before party…

As this debate rages, it is interesting to note that, in the age of the internet, the words one writes in college live on forever. Although, it seems, the significance and meaning of those words may be in the eye of the beholder.

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