Gov. Asa Hutchinson's presidential flirtation hasn't shown up yet in any polls but ranks among the leaders in insiders' screen time.
You could argue that one must start somewhere. At this point, impressing a dozen political insiders on an obscure podcast might be about the best you could do in the Republican presidential sweepstakes if you weren't an oxygen hog named Trump, DeSantis or Pence.
Hutchinson, lately on Sunday-morning television screens more frequently than George Stephanopoulos, was most recently in the spotlight for a half-hour Monday morning on one of The Washington Post's modern mixed-media elements--a streaming live-video platform run out of the newspaper's newsroom that is called "Washington Post Live."
I don't know how many people were watching "Washington Post Live" on their devices Monday morning. Thousands, I'm sure, because it's a big country.
I watched only because I got tipped that our lame-duck governor was going to get interrogated on the state's absence of a rape-and-incest exception on abortion and on his assertion that Donald Trump has made himself unworthy as a Republican presidential candidate for 2024.
And there he was, remotely from his office at the state Capitol, slicing and dicing like another governor of Arkansas he once prosecuted and who made a federal case over what the meaning of "is" was.
In this appearance, it came clearer to me than ever that Hutchinson is something of a national media favorite because he is a Southern governor with no use for, or apparent fear of, Trump, and that he seeks by these appearances to impress influential national Republican figures that he is, or might be, a neo-pleasant conservative--Ronald Reagan absent the polish.
"I'm as conservative as anyone in the country," Hutchinson told the interviewer.
It isn't true, thank goodness. We won't have the Arkansas version of Marjorie Taylor Greene as governor until January. But Asa would probably explain that he means genuine conservative in the Reagan mold, not the crazy version in the Trump era, except he wouldn't say crazy, because he's nice and no name-caller, you see.
He said he was offering himself for consideration as a conservative of optimism rather than grievance.
But that's been done. George W. Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative." Mike Huckabee had a decent early run eight years later as a "Republican who isn't mad at anybody," though he surely now seems to be.
The list of modern-era media favorites whose thoughtful and independent essences charmed the national media includes such presidents as Mo Udall, Bruce Babbitt, Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas, Tim Pawlenty and John Kasich.
All of them were nice and thoughtful before Trumpism made niceness and thoughtfulness unacceptable.
So, Asa is up against it as a nice guy in a party gone bad in a time gone mad.
He fails rather severely, as anyone would, when he tries to treat the rape-incest exception for abortion in an almost secular way--as a matter of waiting to see how the politics play out state-by-state on the Roe v. Wade repeal.
But it's a simple moral question--do you believe it's right or wrong that a girl or woman impregnated by rape or incest would be made to give birth to the result, or do you believe that a fetus is an innocent life no matter the guilt of the sperm source?
Something told me during Hutchinson's Monday session that he'll say "no" when he makes the decision early next year on whether to seek the presidency.
Maybe it was when he said 2024 was a very important year for Republicans and he intended to be part of the conversation ... one way or the other.
Maybe it has to do with polls showing that, as Hutchinson probably calculated, the Jan. 6 hearings are damaging Trump, but not, as he perhaps calculated, to the advantage of someone different than Trump, but in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a version of Trump.
Maybe Hutchinson should join me in taking a long look at this new middle party calling itself the Forward Party. Except that Andrew Yang is in it. Running last or nearly so for the Democratic presidential nomination and the New York mayoralty is not a position of strength for waging a new third party.
On the other hand, Asa might decide on a presidential run on the same basis he proposed a big teacher raise in Arkansas. It's a way that has people asking, "What is he thinking?"
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.