Now entering snark zone

Like the occasional fickle arrows of conventional wisdom, the apparently unintended comedy of the governor’s race may command recurring feature status this election year. Let’s call it: “Live, from Arkansas, the Governor’s Race.”

You might recall that we had the inaugural installment last week.

We recounted that Democrat Mike Ross was trying to smear Republican Asa Hutchinson with the Democratic president. That was on the basis that Hutchinson, many years ago, wrote a nice letter commending the Democratic president’s nominee for attorney general, a man who has subsequently suggested that a few simple firearms restrictions and regulations ought to be applied.

This attorney general also has called on states not to enforce their anti-gay-marriage laws. In Arkansas we embrace the sanctity of traditional marriage, so much so that we do it over and over again with the highest or second-highest divorce rate in the country.

Ross said Hutchinson behaved as one thing in Washington-why, even a praiser of an NRA foe-and something else back home. Hutchinson, confronted with the letter, said that writing it was one of the greatest mistakes of his life and that he now rejects his old and misbegotten judgment so vigorously that he believes that the attorney general he recommended must resign.

It all had approximately nothing to do with reality or relevance or the future of Arkansas after term limitation deprives us of Mike Beebe’s less hilarious leadership.

A few days later, Ross apparently sensed a need to mitigate his attempt to discredit his Republican opponent with the Democratic president. He tried to sound again like an actual and partisan Democrat-or at least a Clinton Democrat, or Arkansas Democrat.

He jumped square in the middle of Hutchinson for having been, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, one of the “managers,” or prosecutors, presenting the impeachment case against Our Boy Bill Clinton in the U.S. Senate.

How dare Hutchinson side against a fellow Razorback? That was Ross’ message.

Here’s how Ross put it in an interview with The Associated Press: “There’s 435 members of Congress and less than a handful conducted the trial in the U.S. Senate. For an Arkansan to say ‘Send me to remove Arkansas’ only president from office’ shows how partisan he is.”

But when you analyze Ross’ statement, you end up with … well, a vacancy of any substantive point. “Less than a handful” conducted the prosecution because less than a handful had federal prosecutorial experience, as Asa had. Hutchinson did not run for Congress so he could try to remove Clinton from office. Hutchinson got to Congress before it came out that Miss Lewinsky had flashed the president her underpants and broken down his defenses.

And presenting the evidence against Clinton in the Senate trial did not necessarily show how “partisan” Hutchinson was. Conceivably it showed instead that the geographic coincidence of birth did not in any way change his opinion of right and wrong in presidential, or human, behavior. If you can’t prosecute a case against a fellow Arkie, then how are we going to have any criminal justice in this state?

Ross went on to tell the AP that Hutchinson “may be the only lawyer in America who has conducted a trial with his brother on the jury and lost.”

Hutchinson called that “snarky.” I’m not sure what to make of it. I think I admire the opposing lawyer for letting Hutchinson’s brother stay on the jury. I think I admire Hutchinson’s brother for voting his conviction even if it meant going against his brother.

Finally, no discussion of governor’s race comedy would be complete without mentioning the appearance on the Capitol View television program last week of Dr. Lynette Bryant, the surprise Democratic primary opponent of Ross.

She showed up in the studio in a lovely pink outfit that, before taping, she covered by donning a housecoat, or bathrobe. Then she meandered during the interview into saying it was undemocratic for Democrats not to have more than one choice for high offices such as governor. Why, she said, you could get out of bed and stagger to the polling place in your housecoat and vote in an uncontested primary.

Then she disrobed. It apparently was to demonstrate that now you need to put on some real clothes before voting because Dr. Bryant is on the ballot. She gave no reason for voting for her over Ross other than that she was a second candidate.

It was the first we’d heard from her publicly since she filed for office. I’d run into her a week or two before and she had declined to talk to me, saying she was waiting for construction of her campaign website.

So now the website is up and running. It has pictures of her with Mike and Janet Huckabee and John Boozman. I suspect that will prompt a few Democrats to climb out of bed and get dressed to go vote, though maybe not for her.

Oh, and I almost forgot Curtis Coleman, who is running as a Republican against Hutchinson. He unveiled a $2.3 billion plan to bankrupt state government over eight years by cutting taxes for everyone except the poorest people.

But then, when a reporter asked about singling out the starving for higher taxes, he said, oops, he hadn’t meant to do that and would fix it.

What I gleaned from the episode is that Curtis Coleman is not, as I had previously thought, the football coach at UAPB.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.