State of no consequence

Those thinking I’m obsessing on Sarah Huckabee Sanders should have been around in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The provincialism of my infant column in its obsession with Bill Clinton was something to behold.

My near-daily spiel was that Clinton was bored with the governor’s job and distracted by national politics, which was entirely true.

It was never more evident, I declared, than when Clinton traveled to Boston for a New Hampshire-related appearance and told reporters there, in the context of his imminent plans, that he’d be calling a special legislative session in Arkansas.

Announcing the calling of a special legislative session in Arkansas to the New England media at Boston’s Logan International Airport … I was equal parts righteously indignant and delighted with the prima facie evidence supporting the theme I’d been advancing.

A lot of people agreed with my criticism. Arkansas had a proud local political identity then.

Now politics in entirely partisan and tribal. Individual state identities are lost to a nation of cable news viewership and social media connectedness. Arkansas is blended into a nation of Fox, Newsmax, Carlson, DeSantis and Trump.

It was hardly worthy of pause last week when Sanders, deep into her national televised response in behalf of all Republicans nationally to Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, offered oh-by-the-way that she would be unveiling the next day an education plan for Arkansas she had steadfastly withheld from the state media. She told her intended audience, not Arkansas, that it was going to be great.

She needed a school-choice talking point in her dutiful regurgitation of all Republican points. Arkansas would do for that.

Sanders is governor of Arkansas for purposes of her duties as a national Republican message maven. She works from a pliant laboratory with an 80 percent Republican Legislature and a 65 percent Republican electorate frightened by matters real and imagined of national liberal Democrats.

The fact was that she didn’t reveal any school plan the next day. She assembled what appeared to be the entire 111-member Republican legislative delegation for an all-white pre-emptive endorsement photo on the state Capitol stairs. There she revealed … wait for it … talking points about the plan will be.

The bill is what matters. A few people might actually read that and make a few notes, circle a few details and ask a few questions, not that it will matter.

There was a rather recent time when a nearly all-Democratic Legislature did not stand behind a Democratic

governor to endorse his unseen bill as he listed a few bullet points about what would be in it whenever it got filed. That’s because Democrats were nominal and nonpartisan then, representing their local public schools more than national messaging, for example.

They operated as more than props for a national party representative using the Arkansas governorship, and the legislators themselves, for nationally applicable local anecdotes and images.

I’d almost say that the system in effect under Sanders in Arkansas resembles a British-style parliament in which the prime minister rises from the legislative branch and rules from the leverage of the majority party or coalition. But the British system includes “question time” when the prime minister comes over to Parliament and goes face-to-face, quip-to-quip and insult-to-insult with the minority members.

In Arkansas there aren’t enough minority legislative members to generate much noise or many questions. The exalted prime minister has a cheering grandstand behind her and only a few neutered gnats in front of her. She is accountable only to her national interest, national ambition and a national audience when she is beamed up by satellite.

Clinton was ahead of his time, nagged at home while aiming for the world. Sanders is a women precisely for her time.

She essentially passes a major anti-public-education bill not by persuasion, strong-arming or horse-trading, but by assembling four-fifths of the Legislature behind her in support of whatever eventually gets filed no matter what those on the front lines here at home think.

A few rural Arkansas public schools are no bother for a message maven from national right-wing headquarters.