It was the next afternoon, rainy and dreary but maybe not so much for smiling, relaxed Asa Hutchinson.
The night before, Donald Trump's handpicked superstar running back, Herschel Walker, had lost the U.S. Senate race in Georgia to Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock.
That made four elections in a row that Trump had lost for Republicans by being shallow, mean, ridiculous, frightful and insurrectionist.
I think we can now add tiresome, which is the worst, and the very thing this monstrous ego that ate America cannot abide.
Republicans failed to take the U.S. Senate amid Democratic blunders and inflation for the simple reason that--in the decisive battlegrounds--Trump recruited Walker to run in Georgia because he was a heroic football-carrier and Dr. Mehmet Oz to run in Pennsylvania because he was a TV doctor with ties to Oprah.
The yahoos will surely fall for that, the celebrity insurrectionist figured.
The yahoos did. But slight majorities didn't. They seemed to think the U.S. Senate was different from a touchdown run and a TV commercial.
Trump is on the deep fade in most of the country just as he prepares to take over Arkansas--succeed Hutchinson as governor, in fact--through a surrogate who ran on the basis of having worked loyally for Trump no matter the lie or outrage.
It's the Arkansas way, being against the national grain.
Anyway, in the course of an interview on a broader subject for another purpose, I lauded Hutchinson for having staked out months ago a frontier non-Trump or post-Trump path to the presidential nomination--a kind of holding pattern for Trump to fade--and waking up Wednesday morning seeing it all come to some undetermined fruition.
He said, yeah, well, there's the chance now that the non-Trump path could become more crowded. He noted that Nikki Haley had formerly bowed out by saying she wouldn't run against Trump, but now might be reconsidering. And he mentioned Mike Pence, who refused to detach from Trump in some respects but does have on his resume that, when it came down to a constitutional crisis, he defied the madman.
Hutchinson said I knew his history well and that surely I didn't think he'd ever shied away from challenging races--against, say, Dale Bumpers or Mike Beebe.
Good point. Maybe running in a big field against a weak Trump would be harder than running in a small field against a strong Trump.
Either way, Asa audaciously holds to the possibility of running.
So, to update my recent metaphor of vehicles on the interstate: Hutchinson and his Camry have finally cleared the last orange barrel and punched up to 65 miles an hour. But there comes Nikki Haley already at 70 on the entrance ramp, not needing to yield. Mike Pompeo is over there on the shoulder, replacing a Trump tire gone flat with a no-Trump spare. Up ahead, Pence's family van has the advantage of an open road. And Ron DeSantis is over the horizon in that sports car, and, beyond that, Trump's Access Hollywood bus carrying the Proud Boys has stalled and appears to be smoking.
Now all of that must be considered in the context of Joe Biden's unlikely emergence as the greatest Democratic presidential politician since FDR.
He surely isn't that. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were better. And JFK was better on a cut-short basis. LBJ accomplished so much more. But you may have heard the factoid of the week, which is that Joe is the first Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt not to sustain a Senate reduction in the midterm halfway into his first presidential term.
And now Joe seems on the verge of the smart and overdue reformation of the ridiculous Democratic presidential nomination process. His party seems set to abandon the irrelevant Iowa caucuses and move the heavily Black South Carolina up in the process with the newly and spectacularly purple Georgia coming in soon after.
That's good for Joe personally and good for Democratic candidate positioning generally.
The Democratic presidential-nominating freeway has Joe coasting in a vintage Corvette, not what it once was, but still a humming classic. Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom are shopping for electric cars and wondering about the access to charging stations on the open road. And Kamala Harris is in what passes for a back seat in the old Vette, unable to get out unless Joe stops to relieve himself and lets her out.
Meanwhile, back on the Republican highway, there's that new traffic trailed by that relaxed old boy from Arkansas. He's thinking he'll cruise for a while and see what happens with all those vehicles out in front of him.
After all, in a few weeks, he won't have anything else to do when the Trump agent moves into his office.
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.