I'm fairly sure--but it's only an instinct--that Gov. Asa Hutchinson didn't give a thorough answer when asked Friday in a session with reporters whether his special legislative session that went kerplunk was a waste of time.
He said it was never a waste of time to invite state legislators to do the right thing.
The comment drove me to the dictionary to look up "too clever by half" and "cheesy." Neither was quite right. But they'll do to relate that the response might have been superficially nice-sounding and self-serving.
Normally, a governor bringing legislators to town for a simple single purpose and failing to persuade them to do the one simple thing he asked--even to get the one bill out of committee for full floor presentation--would be considered a form of high ineptitude by that governor.
But there is little normal about a state of affairs in which Hutchinson has emerged as state government's left fringe.
He's done that simply by accepting and stepping up to the advice of expert health professionals rather than living by Internet conspiracies and cowering when confronted by loudly and primitively misinformed constituents, as is the practice of his party's legislative contingent.
The governor's word finesses aside, the fact remains that he brought legislators to town for a bill to repeal their ban on mask mandates for local schools, then pre-emptively watered the bill down to near-ineffectiveness by applying it only to children younger than 12 in communities with big outbreaks, yet still couldn't even get it out of the health committee in the House, which is where he attempted to start the bill's journey.
So, on the special session's third morning, the legislators adjourned before they ever really started. It had been easy money for them.
That might seem embarrassing to a governor ... unless it seemed simultaneously to be some kind of badge of honor, considering that the Legislature is horrid.
Still, the question perplexing not just me but others is what Hutchinson was up to by calling a special session with both legislative leaders telling him the votes weren't there and a court action more likely to succeed coming up by the end of the week.
I know at least two responsible legislators. One told me Asa needed to take a lesson from Mike Beebe, who would never call a special session until he locked down consensus and the votes, because, merit aside, there was no point otherwise.
Another told me I ought to try being governor during a blankety-blank pandemic amid this blankety-blank public mood.
The answer to the question of why call the session at all rests solely in the Hutchinson mind and he is saying only that it's never a waste of time to ... well, you know.
It could be that he thought he could pass the bill if it ever got to the floor. That would explain why he pre-emptively watered it down. But that doesn't explain what he intended to do about the committee where the bill had to start.
It could be that he wanted to burnish his emerging national brand as a reasonable Republican trying to lead in a Trump-transcendent responsible way.
It could be that he's simply had it with this Legislature stripping his emergency executive authority. It could be that he decided to let them take some executive responsibility to go with their usurpation of executive authority for when the likely school outbreaks start happening in a matter of days.
If I had to guess among those options, I'd come down on his thinking that the bill had a prayer in the watered-down form, if only that, and that, either way, he wanted to force legislators to share the blame since they were so all-fired to do his job or keep him from doing it.
Alas, there's a blessed mootness to all of that. A court rescue came Friday and now will be argued on appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court.
As a lawyer told me Sunday, he withholds any praise for Hutchinson unless he earns it now with a certain crystal-clear action.
He meant the matter of the governor's other statement Friday that he, though a named defendant in the suit leading to the court injunction against the mask-mandate ban, might break off from Attorney General Leslie Rutledge's likely appeal of that temporary injunction and hire his own lawyer to agree with and praise the court ruling and formally ask that it not be stayed or undone.
That'd be swell--the governor saying, yes, the suit names me as a defendant and the appeal names me an appellant, but I actually agree with the plaintiff and the appellee--with their side, not my side--so please do the right thing, your honors, and rule against me here.
I suspect that's going to happen.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.