Because he was the mildly heroic lead item on the national network news Wednesday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson has been much on my mind.
So I thought I would offer three personal conclusions about him.
First, the public is beginning to see why people who know Hutchinson well always speak so highly of him. He is steadily getting revealed as thoroughly decent and thoughtful, maybe even wise, and reliably competent in a methodical way.
That was a positively golden personal anecdote--real and human and resonating--about his liberal son who signed the petition to ask him to veto the gay-discrimination atrocity.
Second, while Hutchinson may have started out in 1986 as an agent of the cultural right of the Arkansas Republican Party, he now is confirmed as instinctively pragmatic and a tad more a moderate than a garden-variety conservative.
Third, he is every bit as politically slick as the famous Slick Willie Clinton ever was.
Hutchinson did very little substantively last week in the matter of that bill providing a religious basis to discriminate against gays. For all the drama, for all the legal opinions about the details, the resulting situation is simply as follows: Before this session, a person had religious freedom in Arkansas and a gay person had no protection against discrimination. After the session: ditto.
But it certainly looked like Asa did a lot.
The state bill he resisted was in fact worse than the replica of the federal law he insisted on instead. The state bill extended religious protections to private-party disputes, not just disputes with government. That's either a mildly significant or major difference, depending on the source and jurisdictional interpretation.
But the perception of difference was out of proportion to any reality.
The next day, similarly embroiled Indiana unveiled its fix, which substantively trumped Asa's. Transcended Asa's, in fact.
Indiana said specifically that nothing in its bill permitted discrimination against an array of groups including gays and lesbians and transgender persons.
That language was never going to fly in Arkansas. The right-wingers powerful on Asa's right flank do not believe a gay person should have any specially designated rights.
So Hutchinson gave us a little Houdini act to get himself and the state out of a pickle. He was all tied-up, and then he was loose.
His right-wing base, represented by legislators who had promised the church people back home to protect them from this supposedly godless Obama government, wanted the expressed state statutory authority of religion to discriminate against gays. The right-wing base put on the governor's desk a bill to do that, one he had promised to sign.
But powers in the business community in and out of Arkansas abhorred such a primitive and destructive notion. The reputation of the state was thus threatened in a way that could harm economic growth, which is what Asa professes that his governorship is all about.
So the man who had people voting for and against the private option at the same time had liberal protesters cheering him on the Capitol steps. Meantime, his right-wing base was conceding that, well, our original bill was fine, and better, but, hey, let's give our governor a little ground, or appear to, in order to rescue him, just so long as we do not have to say that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are a protected class for civil rights.
What Hutchinson did was a sleight of hand, invoking a standard he hadn't previously imposed. He said the state bill sent to him went beyond the parameters of the federal religious rights law signed by Bill Clinton in 1993, primarily to protect Native American rituals. But he hadn't said anything publicly beforehand about that supposed line in the sand.
He moved the goal-line back after the right-wingers crossed it.
If prominent progressives in the national business community forgive Arkansas now, they'll be conceding more to perception than substance--which was Asa's only chance to get them to back off at all, considering that he couldn't possibly get actual protections from discrimination for gays through this Legislature.
So we needed Slick Willie, and we got him.
Here's what to look for in the weeks and months ahead: Petitions likely will be circulated for an initiated act specifically to name gays and lesbians and transgender persons as protected in the state civil-rights law; and, perhaps even bigger, there is the prospect that Asa may, in fact, after a while, issue that executive proclamation granting discrimination protections to state employees, including gays.
I am told that's actually a possibility. And that actually would be substantive.
If Hutchinson were to do that, he would be imposing for state government employees the same protections the Conway City Council recently granted its municipal employees, sending Sen. Jason Rapert into conniption fits from the grandstand about boys in the girls' bathroom.
If Asa were to do that, he would be a modern-day Rockefeller in a weary age of raging Raperts.
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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.
Editorial on 04/05/2015