Is Obama going to lose the Arkansas Democratic primary?

Via Jorge Bonilla in the Greenroom, who sounds the call for “Operation Razorback Chaos.” Two words, my friends: Open primary.

It’s magic time.

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In West Virginia, federal inmate Keith Judd recently swiped 42 percent of Democratic votes from the president, indicating the level of dissatisfaction among the rank and file. And according to a Talk Business–Hendrix College poll conducted on May 10, Obama leads John Wolfe, a virtually unknown candidate, in Arkansas’s 4th congressional district by only 7 points, 45–38.

Three weeks earlier, the Talk Business–Hendrix College poll showed the president leading by 65–24 in the slightly less conservative 1st district, but that was before Obama declared his support for same-sex marriage.

Wolfe, an attorney from Tennessee, tells NRO the new poll numbers indicate Democrats’ discontent with their standard-bearer. “He doesn’t understand them,” he says. “I think it’s more manifest in the health-care area. I think they would like something different.” For his part, Wolfe promises to repeal Obamacare.

Wolfe opposes gay marriage so he’s primed to benefit by drawing a contrast with O’s recent “evolution.” On the other hand, he’s, er, not running any ads so I’m not sure how he’d do that. No matter, though: No one’s voting for Wolfe, only against Obama, so if the backlash is real then this race just got tighter. In fact, Arkansas Democrats are sufficiently worried that they announced today that Wolfe won’t be awarded delegates no matter how well he does because he hasn’t filed all the necessary paperwork. How happy do you think they were to have to issue that just-in-case statement?

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Actually, the best part of this story is the location. Team Mitt’s going to have a lot of fun if The One faces a close call on Bill Clinton’s home turf:

Seeking to attract Democrats and independents who supported the last Democratic president, Romney has taken to lavishing praise at every turn on Clinton’s boom-era ’90s policies while contrasting them unfavorably with President Barack Obama’s old-school, Big Government ways.

The tactic is designed to drive a wedge between the group of Democrats who supported Obama during the epic 2008 primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton: the white, working-class voters who hold the key to many swing states, like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

It’s also a simple way for Romneyland to poke a stick in the eye of Team Obama, using one of its most prominent surrogates but a man who has had a complicated personal history with Obama…

“It’s useful to point out what people already believe about Obama,” Romney strategist Stuart Stevens told POLITICO. “That he’s an old-school liberal who is to the left of the country and relying on old, failed solutions.”

Here’s the man himself, who I’m now calling “President Wolfe,” hitting O from the left on banking.

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