I walked into the event center at Butterfield Trail Village in Fayetteville and a woman walked by looking concerned. She asked if I was there for the Sarah Sanders promotional movie.
No, and that was quite a coincidence.
I was there for my annual leading of a class on politics to the University of Arkansas' Osher Life Learning Institute (OLLI), which is mostly for mature adults.
In the spring, a day after I'd seen the Oscar-winning film called "Nomadland," the OLLI people had asked me to give them a title of this year's presentation so they could get it listed in the fall catalogue. I sent back "Trumpland the Movie--Starring Sarah Sanders."
The concerned woman had been dining at the Butterfield village restaurant. Other residents had come in for dinner expressing concern that they'd just walked through the lobby past the auditorium to find a sign beside the door announcing the showing of this Sarah Sanders promotional movie.
She said she and several others intended to come to the showing to make sure the anti-Sarah view was heard.
She seemed relieved to hear that I was a newspaper guy from Little Rock and that there was no promotional film on Sanders to be shown. I explained that the sign had to do with a lecture on politics I was about to give and that I'd just made up that title thinking it was clever, which it perhaps wasn't.
I told her it probably would be fair to say that my remarks would not be promotional regarding Sanders' campaign to turn Arkansas into an insurrection outpost.
And that's how a clash of political passions might have occurred but didn't Thursday evening in an idyllic northwest Arkansas retirement village. And it's to say the unfolding governor's race of 2022 may not be close, but will stir people up.
During class a man asked how I might possibly write about Sanders' governorship if she wouldn't talk with me. "Disapprovingly," I replied.
Afterward, he came up and asked if I'd please answer his question seriously.
I said the important relationship for a columnist was with the reader, not the newsmaker. I said I have always valued doing my own reporting for these columns, but that, if Sanders declined to talk with me, the important thing would be for me to reveal to the reader what I'd asked of her and relate that she hadn't responded.
News articles are forever saying a newsmaker declined to respond.
Here's what I mean: On Sunday I sent a text to Sanders that proclaimed its blue-screen iPhone delivery and said as follows: "I'm asking you sincerely and in the interest of accuracy whether you maintained residency in Arkansas during those White House years. And, otherwise, whether you and your legal people were out in front of this residency question, as surely you were. If you don't want to answer to me, which I guess I'd understand though it's a simple genuine question, I hope you'll answer for somebody because, amid the legal speculation, there is a set of facts."
Then I texted further: "My take on this is that it's pitiful to cling to a few lawyer-argued words in hopes of getting off the ballot someone you can't persuade a majority of Arkansas voters to choose [I meant NOT to choose], even if she's running to make your state a Trump outpost."
I didn't hear back.
Even so, I've outlined an issue and related my query and position and given the reader relevant information that Sanders either does not want to address the question, or hates my guts, or doesn't trust me to be fair in the treatment of her response, or all of the above.
What has happened is that two lawyers published an article last week citing the state Constitution's phrasing that a candidate for governor must have been a resident of the state for seven years.
They said the meaning of that--whether it meant seven consecutive years, or the most recent seven consecutively, or something else--had never been litigated. They said it could well be settled in a lawsuit challenging Sanders' candidacy, since she was very publicly hanging out in Washington during the immediately preceding seven years. (But she could have maintained her legal residence in Arkansas during those years.)
My view is one of strict construction. Seven years of Arkansas residency means seven years of Arkansas residency, which Sanders fully covers. My view is that a child could live in Arkansas until moving way at age 8 and return at age 96 and become governor if the people chose.
To me, getting the voters to choose you ought to be the lone qualification. If Donald Trump himself wanted to run for governor of Arkansas, rather than act in that capacity through Sarah, then it ought to be up to the Arkansas voters whether to elect an absentee malevolent megalomaniac.
I'm of the get-what-you-deserve school of thought.
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.