The Rutledge report

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said I needed to write a correction. She said I’d been wrong in writing that she and Sarah Huckabee Sanders were such friends that she would not seek the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2022 if Sanders ran. So, she and Sarah aren’t friends? No, that wasn’t the correction, she said. It is true that she and Sanders share political associations.

Sanders is Mike Huckabee’s daughter. Rutledge worked for Huckabee when he was governor.

Sanders was the press spokesman for President Trump. Rutledge was one of the first Arkansas Republicans to go all-in for Trump.

The correction, Rutledge said, is of the notion that Sanders would trump her out of the race. She said her decision would not be affected by Sanders.

I’ve seen poll numbers from January showing that an attorney general has higher name recognition than a lieutenant governor, but a little less than a former press secretary to Trump.

The lieutenant governor, Tim Griffin, has long been running hard for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2022. He doesn’t have a lot to do otherwise.

Sanders is still mulling over running when not doing Trump-embracing Fox News commentary sessions from home or working on a nonprofit organization providing forgivable loans to small businesses imperiled by the virus shutdown. Her cashing-in on speeches has been interrupted at her most marketable time by the pandemic. But her book, Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House, is scheduled for publishing Sept. 8.

Somehow a little choice and timely excerpt got released over the weekend. It has Sanders describing John Bolton as a pompous ass. As we know, Sarah has no patience for pompous asses.

All three of these candidates will need to appeal to the right-wing base. But one or the other may try to sidle from time to time into a more Asa Hutchinson-like lane.

That doesn’t sound like Griffin, who is thoroughly right-wing if not so much by ideology as expediency. But it might be Sanders, whose dad had moderate moments as governor.

Or it might be Rutledge, although she’ll face a hard sell as long as her position, formalized in a federal lawsuit, is to do away with Obamacare and blindly trust the hapless Congress to put something in its place to cover pre-existing conditions.

The U.S. Supreme Court now has that case, and Chief Justice John Roberts probably will save Obamacare again. Thus, the issue may be moot by 2022, unless one or more of the candidates wants to kill Arkansas Works anyway.

For the clearest Republican support of Medicaid expansion, you’d have Sen. Jim Hendren, Asa’s nephew. He declines as yet to take himself out of consideration in this looming GOP gubernatorial battle royal, although he is not widely known statewide and would be burdened by centrist and bipartisan flirtations as well as dynasty implications.

Recent polling suggests independents are turning against Trump, at least temporarily, in Arkansas. Former House Speaker Davy Carter, a Republican throughout his career, is known to have thought about an independent gubernatorial bid, something between the Trumpian right and the Democratic left. I’ve even heard the independent route talked about for Hendren. M eantime, Rutledge’s healthy name identification numbers in the aforementioned poll preceded her controversial use of hundreds of thousands of public dollars in settlement funds won by the state and parked in her office with discretionary spending authority.

This is the money that Rutledge has tapped to appear incessantly in television commercials talking about public needs on which her office can help.

While the expenditures are allowed by law as “consumer education,” Rutledge’s putting herself into the permanent starring role amounts to using public money for campaigning and fails in terms of ethics and integrity.

Rutledge’s defense is that the latest batch of TV spots began at the start of the pandemic to warn vitally of price-gouging. She said she has continued the practice because the response has been strong.

Anyway, she said, the attorney general’s office is not faceless, but one of which she is the elected face.

She said the TV spots amount only to 6% of the fund’s expenditures, most of which go to grants and expert witnesses in complex cases like utility rate-case interventions.

Taxpayers ought to pay for those witnesses through direct legislative appropriations. The rest of the settlement money — or at least most of it — should go into general revenue to be appropriated for grant purposes to regular grant-awarding executive agencies.

But I find legitimacy to the notion of using some small portion of those funds for public service announcements about scams, and I figure the attorney general’s office is as good a place as any.

We are left, then, to rely on an attorney general who declines to abuse the privilege for personal political promotion. Rutledge is letting us down on that point currently. John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@ arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.