So much for normality
It reminded me of 1986 when I wrote that Asa Hutchinson would lose the U.S. Senate race to Dale Bumpers but would always be able to say that he had out-debated the widely extolled finest orator of the Senate.
The young U.S. attorney from northwest Arkansas had the eloquent Bumpers on the defensive all night. Bumpers’ only memorable retort was to say to Hutchinson that he had a “constitutional amendment in your suit pocket for every issue.”
Thirty-seven years later, Hutchinson will lose the race for the Republican presidential nomination but will always be able to say that he garnered a fine write-up in Politico, a leading online political-coverage site.
If weekly appearances on the major network Sunday news shows won’t get you past a fraction of 1 percent in the polls of Republican primary voters nationwide, then a long article on a website won’t either.
But it’s something to save for the grandkids and great-grandkids.
The piece appeared Friday under the byline of
Ben Birnbaum, who spent months working on it. He traveled with Hutchinson’s lightly noticed presidential campaign and scoured Arkansas for sources with historical context.
The article revealed itself in the headline, which read: “The Totally Not Boring Story of the Most Normal Republican Presidential Candidate.”
That was based on an anecdote in the article that Asa proudly told on himself, considering it a compliment. He worked hard to drive home his points to a single voter—and he’s had a few events that were about that size—and won for his efforts not a promise of support, but plaudits on seeming so normal.
When readers need encouragement not to consider you boring, and when you are normal in the era celebrating clinical abnormality in American politics, it may be that there is a logical explanation for your predicament. And that predicament is having to beg people to give you a dollar apiece so that you accumulate enough individual donors to meet the Republican National Committee’s eligibility requirements for the imminent first debate.
That predicament was described in deft metaphor by Birnbaum, who wrote that Hutchinson, as a resume-rich Republican star before Donald Trump, is sometimes akin to a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman in Silicon Valley.
As such, he earnestly beseeches young digital phenoms to let him inside their bungalows so that he can describe the great history in America of bound volumes of printed pages containing vital information. The young whiz kid knows he could have any information he needs on his phone screen long before this drawling combed over guy from somewhere down South could finish speaking a sentence.
Asa is telling Republicans that he has all the relevant conservative bona fides from the Reagan era through Congress, into high-level appointments in the George W. Bush administration, all the way to a recent stint as the eight-year governor of Arkansas cutting taxes and keeping businesses and schools more open than most other states, including Ron DeSantis’ Florida.
Birnbaum describes Hutchinson as a near-composite of all the recent GOP caucus winners in Iowa—“the blue-collar roots of Rick Santorum, the Arkansas folksiness of Mike Huckabee, the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush, the establishment sensibilities of Bob Dole and the eclectic resume of George H.W. Bush.”
But then Asa shows the 2023 Republican voter the bound encyclopedia containing an entry called the “rule of law.” As a traditionalist and practicing attorney who formerly served as a Justice Department district attorney, Asa treasures that rule of law.
Many Republicans, perhaps most, don’t right now. A letter-to-the-editor writer asked a few weeks ago for me to explain why today’s Republicans are so devoted to Trump. I’ll take this shot: They generally know he is a personality-flawed and character-flawed man. But they also know he is the Republican who delivered the U.S. Supreme Court they wanted; that he did so, not with the obliging and losing centrism of John McCain or Mitt Romney, but the in-your-face engagement that spared them Hillary Clinton, and that, while he went way too far in contesting the election, the country has a reputation for Democrat-favoring voting irregularities. And they believe the current Justice Department is abusive in repeatedly indicting Trump while going repeatedly easy on Hunter Biden.
They are fired up only about Trump and against Hunter and his dad.
Trump has diehard support from 40 percent or so of Republicans. That’s plenty in a large field. It’s a base on which he can build when the other candidates fail to inspire.
These voters prioritize what they resent broadly over the glaring personal flaws they see specifically.
And they’re not going to join up with any normal, not-all-that-boring guy going door-to-door peddling vintage volumes of a saner time.
They want to make America great again with Trumpism, not a time warp.
They don’t see Reagan’s morning in America. They see Trump’s dystopia.