Word filtered among state Republican insiders six weeks ago that Sarah Huckabee Sanders seemed interested in the Arkansas governorship next up in 2022, post-Asa.
I mentioned the prospect one Wednesday morning to the retiree class dominated by left-leaning seniors, producing a chorus of retching.
I dealt with the matter in the newspaper by the device of asking Bubba McCoy about it and having his rural wisdom observe that anybody who could handle Donald Trump could dispense as a relative snap with the governorship of Arkansas.
The Washington Post reported Friday--the day after Trump announced she was headed back to Arkansas and that he hoped she'd run for governor--that, while Sanders unforgivably hadn't conducted a press briefing in 94 days, she'd become a major inside player with Trump.
The Post said she talked him down from a Twitter phrase occasionally and even joined him without résumé for some meetings in the Situation Room.
The Post said Trump called her early most mornings to ask for her analysis of the latest bad press with which he was obsessed.
That kind of high-level, high-profile modern political experience is eminently more preparatory for governor of Arkansas than being a hyperbolic preacher like her daddy or a meaningless lieutenant governor like Tim Griffin, who seems the likeliest impediment to her getting the Republican nomination, which, at present, is tantamount to victory.
At the moment, Trump, with 89 percent approval among Arkansas Republicans, would hoist Sanders to the gubernatorial nomination. Her dad, still oddly popular in the state despite abandoning it, would help.
And Sanders would bring her own skills. She's been an ace political consultant. In 2010, while she was managing John Boozman's winning U.S. Senate campaign, I watched her sit in for Boozman in a debate of Republican candidates and wipe the floor with all of them, deploying the contemptuous sneer of her mom and the everyman ingratiating flair of her dad.
She inherited a chip on a shoulder from each.
The essence of the Huckabees is that they are resentful outsiders. They think all the refined people are making fun of them, and they don't mind rubbing a triple-wide mobile home in those people's faces. They think the refined people making fun of them are amoral phonies. They think Bill and Hillary are just the worst.
It was that resentment-based outsiderism that fueled Huckabee's early rise in Republican presidential circles, during which the Huckabees grew to despise rich, mealy-mouthed establishment phonies like, say, Mitt Romney.
Then, when Mike faded fast in his second presidential bid, it happened because all the outsider contempt was going instead to Trump and much of the religious right was going to Ted Cruz.
Thus, Sarah's gravitation to Trump was natural. Her allegiance to him through outrageous statement after outrageous statement was nearly as easy for her as her allegiance to her daddy through outrageous statement after outrageous statement.
And what of her alliance with Trump's hatred of the press? She got that instinct from Mom and Dad when she was at Little Rock Central, friendly with some of the liberals' kids (the "best Huckabee," they said) and a couple of guys in the local commentariat were saying awful things about her folks.
"Why do you hate my family?" she asked me once.
I told her I didn't and that I actually kind of liked the moderate, pragmatic governing of old Wide Body, the old Huckster, except when he was saying something spitefully hyperbolic, which only happened when he was talking. I even liked his wife, Jethrine.
Perhaps Sarah was not persuaded. Perhaps I was a bit too name-calling.
When these rumors of Sarah's gubernatorial interest broke weeks ago, I asked a center-leaning Republican favorite what he thought. He said she'd be all right. He said her dad said wild things but took pragmatic, responsible and even progressive actions. He said she'd probably govern the same, with polarizing rhetoric and pragmatic action.
I actually think she'd govern an inch or two less to the right than Griffin or Attorney General Leslie Rutledge.
Right now, with Trump coming to the state to do a big rally for her, and with dad touring for her, and with her own skills and celebrity, she'd win the Republican primary and proceed to the governorship because Democrats can't beat anybody statewide.
If the nation is saved from a second Trump term, then his star would fade even in Arkansas and make her path less easy. But, unless he was in jail, Trump could still fly down on Trump Air and fill our biggest arena. And Sarah could still compete in her own right with the likes of Griffin.
Maybe the likelier scenario for her not seeking the governorship is that she'll come to embrace that there's real and easy post-Trump money to be made out there. That depends on the extent to which she inherited more than her dad's resentment, but his love of trappings.
Right now, I think being your every-woman governor is what intrigues her.
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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.
Editorial on 06/16/2019