Just need a fighting chance

Isat there thinking the event was working and that I only cared right now in politics about good will and tolerance among people who differ on issues.

I sensed more clearly than ever something I had been suspecting. It was that I value most in today’s po- litical world not policy but a fighting chance at a functioning government that doesn’t nourish, celebrate and exploit bias and resentment.

Whether we forgive some increment of student debt is less important than whether we pre-emptively demonize those who disagree with us on that or any other issue. When Iran attacks Israel, it matters before anything else that half of us not abhor and oppose the American president on whose judgment we are dependent.

Asa Hutchinson spoke Wednesday as a guest presenter to a class on politics I’ve long led. We had an audience of 275, mostly mildly left of center like me or more left than that, and hardly at all conservatively Reaganesque like Hutchinson.

And we were all getting along.

I introduced Hutchinson with his right-wing credentials, expecting audible disapproval. He’d been an impeachment prosecutor of Bill Clinton. After Sandy Hook, the National Rifle Association had appointed him to head a task force that recommended more guns, not fewer, at schools. Instead, I heard only maybe a muffled peep, and I might have imagined that.

But I’d also cited in that introduction his quixotic run for the Republican presidential nomination against Donald Trump. He had stood before jeering pro-Trump crowds and held his ground in standing for the rule of law and deploring the politics of grievance. To that, the class’ applause was genuine, warm and long.

Think about that: Disapproved actions were treated courteously. Approved actions were applauded spontaneously and enthusiastically. Judgment was not personalized. This audience could walk and chew gum at the same time—walking in agreement, chewing gum in disagreement.

That kind of political and personal spirit could keep a government open without brinkmanship. It could enact a border security plan even in an election year. It would keep a president un-heckled in the once-respectable chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives during a State of the Union address. It would put Trump’s Mussolini-like rallies and rants out of business. It would observe Joe Biden’s aging effects but neither ridicule him personally nor exaggerate his symptoms derisively.

Hutchinson handled himself well. He made a topical connection with the audience by telling of the time he went to Cabot to watch his 6-foot-7 grandson play basketball and of running into and sitting beside John Calipari, there to scout and recruit another player. He told of elbowing the Kentucky coach every time his grandson made a good play and encouraging him to recruit not one but two players on the court that night. The topical context was that, at that moment, the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees was approving an absurdly high salary to get Calipari hired to coach the basketball Razorbacks.

Hutchinson told of the thrill this time last year of standing on the square of his hometown of Bentonville and declaring as a candidate for president. He noted the irony that the announcement was his candidacy’s highlight. Thus, he revealed self-awareness and self-effacement, sterling qualities notably absent in American politics today.

He told of Trump’s utter unworthiness. Then, pleasing me most of all, he pulled no punch in saying he found Biden utterly failed as a leader, a weak and ineffective one unable to persuade even when in the right, as on Ukraine. I was pleased because— to be complete—the event needed unpopular candor about honest differences. Otherwise, there would be no chance of exercising tolerance.

Afterward, class members told me they simply didn’t understand what Republicans found so ineffective in Biden but that they now understood my expressions in recent years of high personal regard for Hutchinson.

Obviously, Trump is a special case of personal unfitness. I accept that he is not above the law and is likely fully deserving of at least some of these criminal charges. But politics should not be about wanting your opponent in jail. It should be about showing that your side deserves the election more than he does.

I do not yearn for Trump’s conviction. I yearn only for his political rejection. I know that to be the worst sentence for him.

I don’t long as some do for the imminent lectern audit to make Gov. Sarah Sanders out to be a law-violator. I yearn only for the report to be thorough, clear and so credibly objective that people will have the opportunity, at least, to assess her actions, whether merely irregular or egregious, rather than her polarizing persona.

And should Trump lose in November and refuse to accept defeat, fomenting a crisis for our fragile democracy exceeding the horror he caused the country four years ago, I long for more politicians like Asa Hutchinson, policies aside, and more audiences like the nimble, thoughtful one he visited with last week.