It didn't seem to be enough for Attorney General Leslie Rutledge that she sponsors the evening local news using public money for her self-promoting "Rutledge Report" of so-called public service announcements.
She decided she needed to appear as well in those interludes between commercials.
So, late on a recent afternoon, timed for television, she put out the word that she was, in fact, declaring as a candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2022, when Asa Hutchinson's term-limiting will imperil the state with less palatable right-wingery.
Rutledge joined Lieutenant Governor Tim Griffin, who has been running since he came into the pointless lieutenant governorship--pointless other than as a holding pattern--in 2015.
Days before her announcement, Rutledge was so desperate to get the word out that Sarah Huckabee Sanders wouldn't scare her out of the race--as I'd essentially written, and as I still can't help thinking sometimes--that she deigned even to speak with me to assert that Sanders did not scare her.
I think Rutledge found it necessary to move now. Griffin has long been running hard and openly. Sanders was keeping her in a dark shadow even as Rutledge came on television every day. A poll showed the celebrity Trumpian--Sanders--outpolling Rutledge on favorable name identification even without public money for self-celebrating local television spots.
I also suspect that Rutledge is not fully convinced--as I am unconvinced--that Sanders will pull the trigger.
But people who know Republican politics tell me Sanders is running.
When I tried to speak with Sanders last week, she was unavailable on account of being in the studio recording her reading of her forthcoming book, due out in September. This piece of literature is certain to say that Donald Trump exudes a manly magnificence rivaled only by that of Sanders' own father.
We already know the book will say John Bolton is a lying weasel, because the publisher leaked that excerpt. I think it also will say that Trump's only problem is with the media, of course, as fed by traitorous White House leakers who don't understand that Trump sometimes blows off steam and doesn't really mean what he says.
I forget the name of this book. "Babysitting in the White House" sounds right, but perhaps isn't.
Sometimes it strikes me that being a Trumpian celebrity with a paying gig on Fox that you can perform from your studio at home is better than having to run for--and then be--governor of Arkansas. But a key part of Sanders' planned cashing-in was to be making five-figure speeches right now around the country, and the virus has eliminated gatherings for such things. So perhaps Sanders may as well be governor of Arkansas, her candidacy for which need not begin as early as Griffin's and Rutledge's.
There is Sen. Jim Hendren, Hutchinson's nephew and the outgoing president pro tempore of the Senate, who also fancies running. But I don't know how you run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Arkansas while moving to the left. Hendren is a fighter pilot, not a kamikaze one.
Perhaps that's why you hear talk about Hendren's mounting a third-party independent run, owing to the considerable room possibly opening between the Trumpian base and the Democratic left.
That space is widening according to the recent poll from Talk Business and Politics/Hendrix College. That survey showed Arkansas independent voters, nearly a third of the electorate, to be souring, at least for the moment, on Trump.
I'm thinking a few Trump attack ads on Joe Biden as the demented tool of Antifa and those independents will re-congregate around the lesser of evils they'll again judge Trump to be.
Trump, you'll notice, is finding the enemy he requires to take the focus off his own atrocity. That enemy turns out to be anarchy in the street. It's people who want to destroy our great history of slavery and regional treason.
Then there's former House Speaker Davy Carter, a big-time banker who craftily became speaker by running as the Republican with Democratic backing against the more partisan and conservative choice, and who apparently can't quite get out of his head a similar gubernatorial scenario.
For the moment, such independent splashes seem to hold more currency as things to talk about than do.
Meantime, the Republican gubernatorial primary of 2022 very well could be the largest GOP primary in the history of the state, so dominating the political landscape in Arkansas that independents and perhaps some crossover Democrats will pour into it.
The ensuing observation is deeply ironic considering Rutledge's unrelenting right-wingness that has her joining that multi-state lawsuit seeking to end Medicaid expansion and eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions. But something tells me she has the idea that an Asa-like lane sometimes curving toward the political center might be open to her, at least against the Tom Cotton wannabe that is Griffin.
Sanders won't really need a lane. She'll just have a big rally with Trump and her daddy filling our biggest arena, assuming we'll be back by then to an environment permitting filled arenas.
Oh, yes, the Democrats presumably will have a candidate laden with the Arkansas-fatal stains of cultural liberalism having to do with abortion and gays and so on. Several people in Little Rock, Fayetteville and Eureka Springs will actually vote for that candidate, if you can imagine that.
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.