Mike Huckabee was explaining to Politico why his little girl is that way.
It was that Sarah Huckabee Sanders grew up during his Arkansas political career listening to pollster Dick Morris explain poll esoterica and beholding the bias against her dad in the Arkansas press.
She developed at an early age a political brain and a chip on her shoulder.
“The print press in Arkansas were pretty slanted, and for the most part overwhelmingly pro-Democratic,” Daddy Huckabee said.
But there is nary a non-conservative editorial page in the state except for the alternative weekly, the Arkansas Times. And to say the Arkansas press was slanted all those years is a slur on the fine reporting staffs at this paper and others.
Alas, I often have stood accused of thinking, apparently erroneously, that everything is about me. But, in this case, I strongly suspect it’s accurate to say that the former governor was talking mainly about me and Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times as well as columnists like Ernie Dumas and Gene Lyons.
It odd that there’s a cottage industry of old white-guy left-of-center columnists living in a few-block area in Little Rock’s Hillcrest neighborhood and hanging on to Bumpers-esque and Clinton-esque themes.
I would go so far as to nominate myself as chief offender, considering that — as a daily newspaper columnist writing four to five columns a week for all those Huckabee gubernatorial years — I penned more words than the others, unless you count Brantley’s blog, as I guess you should. And I revealed a penchant I’m not uniformly proud of. It was for name-calling — Huckster, Wide Body, His Eternal Huffiness and, of the first lady, Sugar Button and Jethrine and First Tomboy.
I could establish self-defensive context for most of those references, but it wouldn’t change how Dad, Mom and young Sarah justifiably reacted.
Her parents taught her well to slug the other cheek. Dad, frequently scatological because he thought that more cleverly Christian than the vulgarity he wanted to express, said I wrote while constipated. Mom said I must’ve been run over by a church bus as a child.
There is great irony in all of that. I praised Huckabee often for policies that could have been those of a moderate Democrat descended from Bumpers and Clinton — tax increases, school consolidation, children’s health insurance. It was his chronically hyperbolic rhetoric that usually drew my scorn.
I always liked and admired his daughter — smart, tough, funny and ever-willing to spar in a manner that somehow managed to strike me as good-natured even as it was hostile.
David Ramsey wrote on the Arkansas Times blog that the Politico analysis of Sarah’s background was overdone. He said there was no mystery. He said she simply was a political operative doing what the job required. Being likable is just part of the deal, he wrote.
I think that’s true when she’s working for John Boozman or French Hill. But in her current and steadfast defense of Donald Trump, I see her in her family’s old Arkansas bunker.
Having come of age in Arkansas enduring press commentary that was grounded in vestiges of Clinton-affection and given to ridicule of her mom and dad, she surely sees that theme today nationally.
It’s all pretty much the same, I suspect — being made fun of by Clintonites and columnists in Little Rock and sitting through the White House Correspondents Dinner as a comic makes mean-spirited fun of you.
Either way, it’s clear to you that out-of-touch liberal elitists are trashing you because you’re rural, Southern, conservative, Baptist and Republican. Either way, you respond in kind.
When reporters pressed Sarah on whether Trump had ever apologized to any women he is accused of mashing, she replied by asking if Hillary Clinton had ever apologized to the families of Benghazi victims.
It was an absurd non-sequitur, but it reflected her raising, awash in huffy resentment of perceived double standards when it came to disgusting Clinton behavior.
When the Arkansas Times broke an exposé about the Huckabees’ inappropriate use of Governor’s Mansion funds for personal groceries, what the Huckabees saw was ridicule of their pedestrian Velveeta affinity by wine-and-cheese snobs who covered up Bill’s more low-rent behavior. They thought they were getting trashed for enjoying Rotel while Bill got a pass on a quickie in a bathroom with a lounge singer.
When the Mansion Commission questioned Janet’s appreciation of sconces, she bolted to help tornado victims in southern Pulaski County.
It’s true, Sarah knows, that her current boss, like Dad, sometimes says things that aren’t so. But good Baptists understand that all are sinners dependent on the Lord’s grace.
Sarah needs broader perspective.
She was a toddler when Arkansas opinion-writers were calling Clinton “Slick Willie.” She seems to think no one was ever unfair to Barack Obama. He really was a Kenyan Muslim, right?
Maybe someday she will crawl out of the family bunker. I believe she’s capable of it.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.