There is no single savior for all that ails Arkansas Democrats or our state's politics. But all Dr. Chris Jones Jr. seems to be saying is to give merit a chance.
Politics has seldom been strictly a matter of conventional substance and merit. After all, George W. Bush and Donald Trump became president without any of that, as did a below-average actor before them.
Joe Biden won the Democratic presidential nomination on good will, perceived electability and inevitability, not merit.
Bill Clinton was successful not because of merit from an elite education at Georgetown, Yale and Oxford. It was because of his uncommon gift in that thing that politics until recently was all about, meaning artistry.
Clinton rose to political stardom from the remote province of Arkansas because he connected with you in the current moment and remembered your name in the next. He ran chronically behind schedule from lingering at campaign stops, talking too long to too many people, to the point that his lateness became a matter not of offensiveness, but charm.
Either you can convince an old country boy that you care about his giant squash, and want him to take you in his rickety pickup to see it, or you can't and don't.
Clinton could and did.
All of that is to say that Arkansas Democrats, near-comatose as collateral damage from national Democrats' alienation from Arkansas, are in a position to try something different in the governor's race in 2022.
Browbeaten by the overpowering force of Sarah Huckabee Sanders' inheritance from her former-governor dad and association with Trump, Arkansas Democrats welcomed last week in Jones a gubernatorial candidate who seems to want to kill 'em with the conventional merit of his elite academic record and an apolitical life of high accomplishment.
They may as well try conventional merit. Politics isn't as much art in Arkansas right now as the three Rs: Resentment by Republicans producing rout.
You don't need artistic political talent. You only need Trump's blessing.
Clinton couldn't get elected in the state today if he rode shotgun in every rickety pickup in search of every giant squash. But, at the same time, people are indicating they are increasingly sick of politics.
So, here comes in Jones, a man of 44 with four more college degrees than years spent in politics, which is one, and as an amateur at that, when he was senior class president at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
There are two other announced Democratic gubernatorial candidates--James Russell and Supha Xayprasith-Mays--and they deserve fair hearings. But it was Jones' announcement that seemed to generate the most Democratic interest.
From economic disadvantage in Pine Bluff, he won a full-ride NASA scholarship to Morehouse requiring that he work for the agency each summer. He has three advanced degrees, one a Ph.D., from MIT, where he also was an assistant dean. He is a physicist educated in nuclear engineering and urban planning who has done stints as a teacher and nonprofit director. He also is a minister.
He chose to return to Arkansas four years ago with his doctor wife and three children. He spent three years running the Regional Innovation Hub in North Little Rock trying to stir new-economy energy in the state. He unveiled an announcement video that you can find on YouTube that deftly blended his biography of faith and science into an engaging story of a seventh-generation Arkansan.
Jones says Sanders hasn't ever held office either. He makes a point to say that his dad was never governor of the state. He adds that no governor of Arkansas has ever looked like him. Jones is a Black man.
"I know what I don't know," Jones told me last week when I asked if he agreed and understood that he's in an entirely new arena now.
"I will make mistakes. But one thing NASA stresses is learning from mistakes and applying that learning quickly."
I asked about widespread thinking that our brightest and best--and you'd have to put Jones in that category--no longer want to enter politics because of its diminishment into dysfunction and personal destruction. Again, he invoked NASA, which, he said, teaches the virtue of doing hard things for the greater gain.
"And one thing we've got to do is change that narrative" of diminished politics, he said.
Democrats also ran a conventionally meritorious candidate for governor four years ago. Jared Henderson got 32 percent. But Asa Hutchinson was a popular incumbent without great negatives.
Sanders is not quite an incumbent, and she has some negatives.
A contest of these two might be interesting. It would pit a bloodline candidate professionally trained in stoking fear and resentment in talking-point rote against a political virgin offering physics metaphors.
It still might help if the latter had a curiosity about giant squash.
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.