Asa Hutchinson appeared last week on Fox News in what until recently had been Tucker Carlson's hour. Hutchinson was interviewed by a substitute host, Lawrence B. Jones, who seemed incredulous that Hutchinson would seek the Republican presidential nomination while possessed of views not popular in current Republican polling.
Hutchinson explained that campaigns and debates therein are what political primaries are all about.
Indeed, they're about--or ought to be about--politicians seeking to lead and persuade their chosen parties, not the other way around. Bill Clinton introduced a "new Democrat" of a "third way." George W. Bush championed a "compassionate conservatism." Barack Obama beat the party, which was an adjunct of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Donald Trump championed only himself and ended up persuading Republicans to embrace insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
I don't know that encouragement to insurrection would have polled all that well among Republicans in 2016. It polls well now, Trump having well-persuaded.
Jones seemed not to understand why Hutchinson would run for the GOP presidential nomination while supporting Ukraine against Russia with poll numbers on Republicans' support for Ukraine down to 42 percent. Hutchinson mentioned the factor of his thinking it was the right thing.
Jones seemed aghast that Hutchinson vetoed a bill in Arkansas to ban hormone-therapy treatments for gender-dysphoric minor youth even when parents and doctors agreed on those treatments. Hutchinson mentioned the factor that he thinks doctors and parents are preferred decision-makers and that there are other ways to protect children without wholesale usurpation of parental authority and medical expertise.
Parties change. Republicans aren't the party of Abraham Lincoln anymore. They hardly get votes these days from people of the color of those whom Lincoln freed. Democrats aren't the party of FDR anymore. They can hardly get votes these days from rural Southern white people who liked the New Deal and those electric wires coming through the trees to their shanties.
Ideally, parties are general alliances providing support for the ideas conceived and advanced by their leaders. They are not censors or regulation-enforcers against people seeking to run in their primaries.
Sometimes what the people want is change from party lines.
Primary voters will decide. They may overwhelmingly reject Hutchinson because of that transgender-youth position. One of the other candidates may destroy him on that in a debate the way Chris Christie turned Marco Rubio to mush and Elizabeth Warren slapped Michael Bloomberg back to the comfort of his billions.
But Hutchinson has the right to show the guts to invite that risk and work the angle that maybe you strongly disagree with him on that, but there are bigger concerns at work for our party and country.
What America needs are more politicians who align with their parties but are not beholden to their parties.
Think what you will of Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, once a confirmed Democrat and now an independent saying both parties fail the nation and that she has no use for either.
I haven't decided what I think of her generally, but I lean favorably from what I saw Sunday on "Face the Nation" on CBS. The program ran the recording of her being interviewed two days before at the Sedona Forum put on by the McCain Institute named for John McCain, the epitome of a maverick Republican.
Pressed to say what she would do to break through the national political dysfunction she largely blamed on the parties, she said the first fix wasn't all that hard. It would be for a decisive number of American people and members of Congress to commit to work together no matter the party on the things on which they can agree. They could begin addressing, if not solving, the country's greatest needs.
She has a demonstrated record on that. By reaching out to Republican senatorial colleagues she liked and knew to be reasonable--Mitt Romney, Rob Portman, et al.--she was the main forger of the infrastructure compromise. When she saw a chance for modest but conceivably lifesaving gun reform, she went to her pal Mitch McConnell, who has called her the most effective first-term senator of his memory, and asked him which of his charges she should work with to try to get it done. The bill became law. Now she works with Republicans on what she admits is "half a loaf" on immigration. She explains that half a loaf is plenty welcomed by those hungry.
I'm not opposed to the two-party system, which has its conveniences. I merely want it to be less ridiculous.
I favor members within parties wagging their own tails, not tucking them in cowering deference to parties.
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.