Taking the royal road

Arkansas has never experienced a coronation before. Even as a longtime one-party Democratic state, it offered competitive gubernatorial primaries and frequently legitimate general election contests.

Voters wanted to get to know their governors and gubernatorial candidates. They placed a premium on personal campaigning. They expected expressions of dedication to the state. They were suspicious of outside influences. When a governor ventured into activity reflecting national political aspiration, the voters called him too big for his britches and took him down a notch.

Now the state witnesses with seeming acceptance the arrogant, unaccountable, Arkansas-eschewing nationalized march to the governorship of an agent of Donald Trump who:

• Raises vast sums of money overwhelmingly out of state from a Trump network.

• Doesn’t even mention the state in her latest television advertising.

• Prefers instead to deploy that advertising to attack a national news organization that hurt Trump’s feelings, a concern seeming to matter more to her than the state.

• Puts out news releases seeking publicity for supposed policy meetings with special-interest groups though she doesn’t identify those persons or allow the media to cover the meetings even as she seeks to tout them for publicity by presuming to write her own news articles.

Amid such new- age, Arkansas-dismissive haughtiness, Sarah Huckabee Sanders becomes our queen-in-waiting hardly bothering even to wave to us along her chariot’s processional. She escapes serious opposition in the Republican primary and leads comfortably over Democratic primary hopefuls who are unknown and politically inexperienced.

I understand to an extent her television commercial unveiled last week. It seems extraneous since she has no meaningful primary opposition and no serious Democratic threat. But she has millions of dollars to waste and she may as well go ahead with her early biographical messaging.

The spot seeks to present her as a regular mom happening to have worked in the White House for the supposed great one. It has her saying “no” around the house to the common hyperactive antics of her young kids and saying “absolutely not” when one of them turns the television set to CNN.

It’s a fine piece of pabulum except for the nonsense of an Arkansas gubernatorial candidate advertising for our chief executive’s job by assailing the national news organization covering Ukraine better than any other.

Then there was the oversight pointed out by her perhaps likeliest Democratic opponent, Chris Jones. He put out a statement that the race ought to be about real things, and that Sanders’ commercial probably should have included at least one word never mentioned. That would be Arkansas.

I would say “oops” to that although Sanders is too smart to forget to mention the state if she really thought it made a darn. She knew what she wanted to say, which was “radical left” and “Biden.”

The point is advancing Trumpism. For her purposes, the location is not of consequence. Trump worship transcends state lines. And these TV spots are expensive. Words must be prioritized.

I’m thinking no one found the commercial as enthralling as Sanders did, unless she texted it as a link to Trump, which I’d wager she did with little hearts or a smiley-face.

Meantime, in the area of what might be called “earned media” but in fact amounts to attempted theft of otherwise earned media, we have this new tactic from Sanders: She sends news releases announcing that she met the day before with private parties for a policy discussion on this or that — education, economic development, law enforcement — and declaring without detail that much valuable discussion was had.

At one point, she was sending media advisories with advance notice of those meetings. But when a media organization sought details about the time and place for the old-fashioned practice of covering the announced event with a reporter, the Sanders campaign said the confabs were closed.

Then the advance notices stopped, but the self-promotional and detail-devoid news releases continued after the fact.

Basically, these news releases amount to royal communiques saying the queen-in-waiting granted a private audience yesterday and received several bows and curtsies.

Arrogant inaccessibility in a governor or a gubernatorial candidate is all new to an old-time newspaperman who once got permission from Sanders’ dad to hang out in his transition office as he prepared to ascend to the governorship on the on-again, off-again, on-again resignation of Jim Guy Tucker. And who traveled with Frank White on his failed reelection campaign though Frank, at the time, couldn’t stand him.

And Asa Hutchinson hasn’t “blocked this caller” on me, at least that I know of.

This new royal era is a generational descent that is simply going to take a little getting used to.