New campaign spots were released last week by the likely general-election combatants for governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Chris Jones.
To consider them was to confront vividly the current Arkansas political condition.
Sanders, the Republican, offered a message that was resentful and voter-connecting. Jones, the Democrat, offered one that was positive and aspirational.
Her ad was about the everyday pain of going to the gasoline pump. His was about a child's dream of going into space. Hers was about beleaguered adulthood. His was about the playful imagination of youth.
His ad went for hearts. Hers went for votes. I score a bull's eye for both.
Let's describe them, first hers, then his.
Sanders' commercial begins with her pumping gasoline into a black SUV. She seems downcast. Right away the message is that this is an Arkansas everywoman, filling up and not liking what she has to pay, driving an SUV because she's a regular mom with those young kids she won't let watch CNN.
The video monitor on the pump happens to show the most unpopular politician in Arkansas, Kamala Harris, saying "we did it, Joe" to the second-most unpopular politician in Arkansas, President Biden.
Sanders shakes her head at that and gripes "you sure did," meaning, in her view, that Biden gave us high gasoline prices and inflation that she, Sanders, will address by phasing "out," not "down," the state income tax. Thus, she says, she'll give people a raise to fortify themselves against the Democratic tax increase of inflation.
How we'll fund state government without an income tax, and whether we'd have to double the sales tax to be paid at the Walmart to which she wants us to think she's headed ... that's a math bridge to be crossed after she gets elected as a gas-pumping, Biden-resenting everywoman.
Jones' commercial shows a young child, 10 or 12, costumed as Luke Skywalker--clearly meant to represent the candidate himself two to three decades ago--sitting on the porch of a modest Pine Bluff home making a Stars Wars-styled lightsaber and dreaming of going to space.
Jones, who went on to attend MIT and work for NASA and become a physicist, credits an Arkansas childhood that gave him not outer space, but the space to imagine and grow and learn. He says his goal as governor is to nurture childhood dreams and provide that space for future Arkansas generations.
Her spot probably connects with 60 percent or more of Arkansas voters, reflecting that they deplore national Democrats and are weary of their day-to-day grind.
His probably connects with 40 percent or fewer who assess a broader political canvas that encompasses lofty principles extending well beyond today's gasoline-pump transaction.
Her ad is sour; his is sweet. Be advised that sour has been creaming sweet in Arkansas elections since 2010.
Together the ads' messages define the two parties in their current Arkansas incarnations. Together the ads foretell the 60-40 Republican advantage most likely to be seen in November.
And it's been that way increasingly for Republicans and Democrats--not just in Arkansas, but across non-urban America--for decades now.
Democrats once ruled in Arkansas by combining Sanders' everyman connection and Jones' lofty aspiration.
Post-Orval Faubus, Dale Bumpers came from small-town lawyering to talk of the nobility of politics. Bill Clinton got cheers on the campaign trail saying his opponents were running on what was wrong with Arkansas while he ran on what was hopeful for Arkansas.
Arkansas politics in the late '60s through the end of the century was about positive reform to overcome ol'-boy machine politics and the humiliation of 1957 in Little Rock. Since then, Arkansas politics has become all about resentment and transaction and not an iota about nobility and hope.
Arkansas politics in 2022 is intensely about being high-peeved about unwanted change.
Sanders, a veteran political operative, understands that better than most. She wants to make clear--and is succeeding in that desire--that she resents with the best of them and is offering pandemic-weary and inflation-weary voters the transaction of relief from what the supposed bad guys are doing to them.
Jones, a resume-rich newcomer to politics--and a pastor--wants to take us back to the future to a time when political magic was made, and might be made again, from childhood dreams and a simple commitment to good education.
At the moment, though, the education issue in Arkansas is that the schools are getting so liberal they're trying to tell our kids too much.
Thus Jones probably has positioned himself in 2022's political no-man's land, both behind the times and ahead of his time.
Right man, wrong place; right dream, wrong mood; right message, wrong mailing list.
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.