Gov. Asa Hutchinson gets a B-minus, grading on the modern curve.
He is trying his best to govern a state that doesn't believe in government, but in Donald Trump. He is laden with membership in a modern Republican Party that no longer believes in American democracy, but Trump.
Hutchinson has been in public life since the '80s. Thus, he is of the Pre-Insane Era of American Republicanism.
So, yes, Asa's televised address last week on the surging pandemic was by tactical design a Milquetoast performance.
He sought to find a balance, to raise alarm and offer encouragement on the virus without proposing any new restrictions lest the yahoos descend on Little Rock and start yanking masks off socialist sheep.
Hutchinson offered nothing remotely substantive except that he wants the state Legislature to give him a formal partnership on the virus-arising emergency executive powers he is extending.
Bear in mind that 33 Republican legislators have signed a proposed interim resolution to endorse abandoning American democracy in favor of a Trump dictatorship.
Hutchinson wants these legislators to put their votes where their masks aren't.
These 33 legislators offered a thankfully meaningless resolution of support for the blessedly moot Trump-Texas attempt to keep Trump as president though the people voted him out.
A few other Republican legislators have gone to court to try to force Hutchinson to stop exercising emergency powers. Trump has plainly shown them the virus is no big deal. All you need is to get breathed on by people at close range, and, if infected, check into a corner suite at Walter Reed and order the nation's best doctors to cook up special therapeutics for you.
Modern American conservatism is simply not suited for periods of human need. It works in Utopia but comes up short on Earth.
And it has turned so cultish for Trump that it has allowed this grotesque madman to remake the Republican Party into an agency of his megalomania instead of an organization supporting America.
Amid that madness you have an old-style religious conservative like Asa, who once scared me with extremism before I found out what extremism really was, trying to govern competently while staying viable and effective.
So, the governor tells us on TV that Jesus will be all right with our celebrating his birthday with more restraint this once.
I, for one, appreciate Jesus' practical politics, assuming Asa's hot line is good.
Hutchinson is forever trying to apply old conservative sanity amid new conservative insanity.
He was one of the first Republicans to say he expected Joe Biden to become president (on the basis of Biden's having won in a free and fair American election).
He said the other day that Biden's promised mask mandate on federal installations would not affect Arkansas policy except to help by sending a more "consistent message." That was euphemistic, a way of saying Trump was a hideous disgrace (my phrase).
No, he said when asked, he did not talk with Attorney General Leslie Rutledge beforehand about her attaching the state to the Texas-Trump nonsense of a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out mailed votes only in states where they hurt Trump. He said that was her independent constitutional business. He said he hadn't been asked to sign anything supporting that absurdism (my word), and wouldn't sign if asked.
U.S. Reps. Bruce Westerman and Rick Crawford signed a friend-of-court brief along with more than 100 other modern Republican insurrectionists in the U.S. House supporting the Texas-Trump attempt to disenfranchise anyone mailing in votes in four states that Trump lost, though people mailing in votes in 46 states, including Arkansas, were fine.
Crawford flat-out said he didn't trust what the American political system was telling him about the election. Those 33 legislators specifically say they don't trust the returns from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.
They were calling our country a banana republic corruptly lying to its people for some sinister purpose like human empathy.
Arkansas gave 62 percent of its vote to Trump. When you discount Little Rock, Fayetteville and the Black vote, you have to figure that between seven and eight in 10 white rural Arkansas voters support this pro-Trumpism and anti-Americanism.
By the Texas-Trump example, California ought to file a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court calling for the votes of rural white Arkansas voters to be thrown out.
So, yes, a Republican dating to ancient 20th century American Republicanism found it advisable to go on statewide television last week and say as little as possible in hopes that somebody somewhere might catch the drift of yesteryear's sanity.
Asa's B-minus will look like an A-plus when either Rutledge or Sarah Sanders, both cultists of the post-sane generation, succeeds him.
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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.