Maybe it's a void. Maybe it's the breach. Either way, Asa Hutchinson has really stepped in it.
There he was, back on Sunday-morning network television. He was more candid than ever and broadly critical this time of Republican leaders and extremists rather than only of Donald Trump. He seemed a little more significant and prominent than merely the Republican governor in Arkansas who doesn't mind criticizing Trump.
I had a thought while watching Hutchinson on "Meet the Press" on NBC four days ago. It was that an unknown or lesser-known presidential candidate sometimes can catch a wave by getting out front on a message primary voters are looking for. It was that Hutchinson is doing his best to get out front on Republican rejection of Trump and, in an update, the disruptive madness elsewhere in the Republican Party.
He is plodding toward a theme, which is "back to the future," to Reaganism revived, meaning conservative all-around for sure, but with a smile invoking morning in America rather than a snarl decrying and exploiting carnage in America.
Our governor has put himself in a lane. It's the one for Republican voters who reject Trump as nuts and aren't rushing to Ron DeSantis. That's about a fourth to a third of the Republican vote, at least until DeSantis fades, as he might. A fourth to a third can take first place in a multi-candidate primary.
Then there's Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, maybe Nikki Haley. But they bring service-to-Trump baggage into the lane. Asa has been pedaling there for more than a year.
What, asked moderator Chuck Todd, would keep Hutchinson from running for president?
It was the right framing of the question. Hutchinson is on his mark, ready and set.
But you haven't really done anything until you ... you know ... go.
Decades ago, a newsroom buddy got asked by the editor how a certain article was coming. He replied, "All I've got left is to write it."
So it is with Asa, except that, in answer to Todd's question, he said what's left is to get a feel for whether there's real potential support for him.
Todd seemed to elevate Asa's context, asking him as if he's an elder national Republican conscience about the brawl among House Republicans over whether to elect Kevin Mc- Carthy speaker; about Marjorie Taylor Greene's primitive atrociousness in bragging that the Trump insurrection would have been fully armed and successful if she'd planned it, and about DeSantis, who once advocated covid vaccines, now calling on the Florida Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury to investigate whether the pharmaceutical industry misled Floridians about the potential range of side effects.
Hutchinson replied as an equal-opportunity scolder.
He said Republican leaders don't have to concede to rightward extremists, and ought instead to engage them directly in "the marketplace of ideas." He said Republican leaders can't be afraid to go directly to the audience that laughed and applauded Greene's demagoguery and take her on.
He said, of DeSantis, that Republicans will take a destructive path if they "diminish facts" and "undermine science"--if they choose to re-litigate the 2020 election and the pandemic response rather than a forward-looking essence.
It was as if a national news show was presenting the last Republican adult.
Is there a market for that? Or is Asa simply extending his RINO nose and inviting modern-day versions of "conservatives" to punch it?
On the one hand, I'm watching Hutchinson perform on national television as the most moderate Republican figure on the scene. On the other, he's telling me he senses prospects for traction in Iowa among religious evangelicals. And I'm wondering whether he, while getting punched in the nose, also pulls a muscle and splits his britches.
Consider his straddle on the Jan. 6 commission's criminal referral on Trump. He said Trump indeed inspired the insurrection, but that the commission was too partisan from the beginning to refer the matter to the Justice Department without complication.
It's common now for Arkansas governors to run for president and for me to be both wrong and right about them.
I thought Bill Clinton couldn't possibly be the best Democrats had in 1992 and that character flaws would ruin him. But he turned out to be the best Democrats had in a generation, except that, eventually, a young woman smiled at him and his character and pants went south.
I thought Mike Huckabee was running mainly to perform so glibly in that radio voice that he would get a show on Fox. But then he won the Iowa caucuses and several Southern primaries. But then he wound up with a show on Fox.
I see Asa as Bruce Babbitt or Paul Tsongas, meaning the truth-telling candidate the mainstream media like most and lament most in loss.
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.