Down to the essence of men

The essence of President Trump’s now-interrupted virus briefings was personal ego. The essence of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ongoing ones is mild and casual poetry providing reasonable candor.

The essence of Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s, now 46 days and running, is that he hopes to goodness these daily numbers will keep justifying with only the slightest spin his restarting the state economy.

Trump’s essence revealed infantility to anyone who somehow had not previously seen it. Cuomo’s has revealed something of a smug performance artist, like his late dad Mario and his kid brother Chris, but one New Yorkers could reasonably rely on and much of the nation found interesting and informative.

Hutchinson’s essence reveals him as a man who has spent five years as governor of Arkansas seeking to fashion a legacy as an economic builder in a state too long in the backwater. By that essence, he is concerned that both the state’s economic improvement and his own legacy could be harmed by this virus.

I’m not saying he doesn’t care about the physical health of the state’s people. I’m saying the state’s economic health is what his governorship has been more about, quite nearly all about. And the coronavirus threatens to waylay it and him.

Hutchinson is of the classic business-Republican mold, holding that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now the virus has brought on a serious drought. And his attitude remains that what we need is to raise back the water level, not try to pick up every boat one at a time.

He needs rain, even if a sprinkle, for Phase One.

Mayor Frank Scott of Little Rock once urged Hutchinson without success to issue a general stay-at-home order for Arkansas. The mayor theorized that Hutchinson’s aversion came from his foreseeing a tough way back post-virus for state and regional economies all around the country, but especially for Arkansas because of its historic lagging condition.

So, as the mayor supposed, Hutchinson wanted to keep in operation as much of the state’s economy as possible to reduce the steepness of its hill on the way back.

I related that theory to Hutchinson and invited him to respond yea or nay. I never heard back, which either means he was busy or didn’t find enough fault with the theory to argue, or both.

Every day, Hutchinson comes out to his afternoon briefing to read statistics and point to charts either to make the point that an increased number of cases overnight is an understandable and inconsequential fluctuation, or that a flattened seven-day rolling average not counting prison inmates represents the real story.

His has been mostly harmless or defensible massaging except for that time he chose to believe a bogus map from the White House purporting to show Arkansas doing more virus testing than the states around it when it was in fact doing the next-to-least. He knew better. Maybe he was tired.

It’s fair that prisoner infections don’t matter in his prevailing narrative of successful community containment, which is not to say they don’t matter in his heart, into which I can’t see.

Differentiating between the narrative-worthiness of people with viral infections without seeming to differentiate in terms of human worth is a delicate undertaking. And delicacy is not at the tip-top of this governor’s skills.

It is doubtful that he really intended anything personally discriminatory the other day in complaining that federal health officials had been slow in doing tests at the federal prison in Forrest City.

What he said was that the tests should have been done already, “particularly for staff.”

He didn’t mean, I’m sure, that the employees were worth testing and the inmates not. He meant their numbers matter differently both in statistical terms and in a context specific to his driving objective.

He meant, clearly, that the employees go back into the community to threaten an uncontained situation that would bear on the appropriateness of an economic relaunch.

It surely irked Hutchinson that a new rash of positive cases in that federal prison—arising now only because federal testing was taking place two weeks after he requested it—would run up his bar graph for a day or two. That would force him to explain that those numbers matter, of course, but not to the free-world case he is making for steadily restarting the state economy.

What we got from Trump each late afternoon was the world’s largest nursery brat.

What we get each morning from Cuomo is a man pleased with himself that so many find him pleasing.

What we get each early afternoon from Hutchinson is a man who wants history to say he got the Arkansas economy up and running again after a crisis.

And we can all root for him on that.