People from Arkansas run for president all the time anymore.
After Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee and Wes Clark, we now confront a presidential hopeful who could well get creamed in the Arkansas Republican primary if he got that far. His big announcement Wednesday on the square in Bentonville probably will be page-one news out of obligation, though a nice spread on the Arkansas section front probably would suffice.
I mean no offense to Asa Hutchinson. I like and admire him, and frequently say so, as do a growing number of center to center-left types in Arkansas who have come to appreciate his mild-mannered pragmatism and honest conservatism even more considering the in-our-face extremist demagoguery that succeeded him in the Governor's Mansion.
A GOP debate foe maybe named Trump is apt to quip--if Asa gets to the point of being worth the effort--that Hutchinson is the first man ever to try to get votes from Iowa conservatives on the basis that liberals in Arkansas kind of like him.
Hutchinson will get treated better in national media than in Arkansas. While he became a near-regular on CNN in recent months, Arkansas voters were tuned to Fox cheering the genius of people now officially liars.
Asa is respected widely among the informed and fair-minded for his broad resume: as a U.S. attorney who personally confronted armed right-wing separatists, as a member of Congress, in high-level homeland security and drug enforcement jobs in the George W. Bush administration, and as a rare breed in contemporary Republican politics considering that he was a Southern governor eschewing culture-war bills and willing to take on the malignancy of Trump when no one else was.
You want spunk? Hutchinson actually tried to tell backwoods Arkansas good ol' boys that they had to wear masks. Well, let me not overstate: He signed an order that they had to wear masks and then told the truth that he wouldn't risk civil war by dispatching state troopers to drape stretch bands over rural-Arkansas ears.
Hutchinson gets blamed by the harder left for splitting differences that way. He'd sign a bill that he said was bad on the basis that a veto would just be overridden, then bypass the state attorney general to hire his own counsel to intervene in a successful lawsuit against the bill he signed while saying it was bad.
But America's differences are so embedded and destructive that what it needs more than anything right now is someone willing to split some differences.
Hutchinson is not nearly as boring in what he does as in how he seems.
That was one of my entries on a questionnaire a national news organization sent last week, which I will now summarize:
Q: Should we take Hutchinson's candidacy seriously?
A: We certainly should, but probably won't because he's a tortoise willing to plod along for 30 years in Arkansas until his ship came in, and this presidential field on the Republican side will be dominated by front-running wild hairs. He doesn't have 30 years to wait this time.
Q: What's his message?
A: It's that the Republican Party went over a conservative cliff a few years ago, but he hung back.
Q: Is there anything about his candidacy that inspires or particularly troubles?
A: What inspires is that he's precisely what the country needs, whether from the right or left, meaning someone standing well back from cliff's edge who can surprise you with independent thought and common sense defying the embedded philosophical and partisan divide.
Q: What if you were a Republican political operative? What would be your elevator pitch for Hutchinson's candidacy?
A: It would be, "Let's go back to the future to a time when the Republicans could actually win a nationwide popular vote." Or, "If it's conservative you want, heck, I went to Bob Jones University."
Q: How would you score Hutchinson's chances on a scale of one to 10?
A: Two is as high as I can go.
But that "two" denotes only that he's running in the Republican primary dominated by people somehow still alive at the bottom of the cliff.
Two of the more astute Arkansas Democrats I know--Mike Beebe and Skip Rutherford--got quoted in this newspaper Sunday offering the same insightful truth. It's that Hutchinson would have a superb chance in the general election that it seems highly unlikely he could ever reach considering the cliff-wreck he'd have to negotiate to get there.
If the question was to rate his chances as the Republican nominee in the general election, I'd give him a 5.5 against Joe Biden and a seven against the wholly distressing Democratic field post-Biden--unless Trump ran as an independent and denied him the GOP base at the bottom of the cliff.
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.