Joe Biden was flailing with a gimmick per usual. Chris Jones was reminding that he was flailing even before his president was.
Asa Hutchinson was being all practical and cautionary, like a governor.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders was being breathtakingly arrogant, also per usual, staying firmly on message that her campaign for governor is nobody's business.
This was Wednesday's political snapshot of situation normal, all bleeped up.
The issue is that the American economy--the global one--is an inflationary mess at risk of descending to recession. It poses a consumer hardship most dramatically represented by the soaring price of gasoline.
It's not the Democrats' fault, but is the Democrats' problem. That's how it goes in politics. People vote their pocketbooks more than that Donald Trump ought to be in jail.
The failure of Biden's presidency is that he doesn't engage and lead. He reacts and concedes.
Months ago, some of his party's U.S. senators at risk of midterm defeat--by which Democrats would lose their fingernail Senate control--started pleading for a federal gasoline-tax suspension. That way, they could divert federal highway money to their campaigns.
Biden resisted until Wednesday when he endorsed a three-month suspension of the 18.3-cent-per-gallon federal gasoline tax.
He has no accomplishment to cite other than the bipartisan infrastructure bill, to which he reacted rather than contributed. Center-leaning Democratic and Republican senators worked that out.
So now, Biden wants to take millions out of infrastructure at the same time he wants credit for someone else's work on a separate patchwork of additional spending for infrastructure. He wants to rob the Peter that is the infrastructure he professes to champion to pay Paul who is a Democratic U.S. senator at risk of getting beat in November.
His good friend Tom Carper, Democratic senator from Joe's Delaware, responded that a gasoline-tax suspension was "short-sighted and inefficient." And I'm positively elated as a practical centrist to side in this matter with U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, leader of that usually nonsensical "progressive wing" of the Democratic Party.
She said a gasoline-tax suspension would not make it down to consumers and thus was not the answer.
Meantime on Wednesday in Little Rock, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Jones spoke to the Political Animals and reminded that he'd called weeks ago for suspending the state gasoline tax of 24.8 cents a gallon. He acknowledged the loss of highway funding, but said people are hurting.
They'll hurt more if the gasoline-tax suspension gets absorbed in ever-enigmatic pump prices and their heads bang against the tops of their pickup cabs as they bounce down maintenance-abandoned roads.
For Jones to have any chance to save the state from the secret campaign of Sarah Sanders, he must separate himself from Biden, whom Arkansas voters abhor by two-to-one. Touting a me-too with Joe is not the way to go.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Wednesday that we need all the gasoline-tax revenue we now generate to pay for all the highway projects now underway. And he said we can use this $1.5 trillion general-revenue surplus--that's entirely separate from the special highway revenue--to accelerate the imposition of already approved income-tax cuts.
That would give people an instant pay raise in withholding reductions and a break that wouldn't be taken away in three months.
Finally, there is Sarah Sanders, who demonstrated another of her arrogances and contrivances on Wednesday.
She put out another news release saying after the fact that she'd had another "policy meeting" behind closed doors--this one on timely energy issues with energy-industry people in El Dorado.
We were not notified of this event publicly in advance nor allowed to attend. We are to take her word for it that it was a good meeting and that she led it splendidly.
As for her specific policies, her news release declared, "As President Biden continues to destroy our economy with his America-last energy policies and beg other nations for foreign oil, it's time to unleash the resources we have right here at home. As governor, I will enact bold, conservative reforms to create an environment that allows the energy industry to continue to invest and diversify."
Sanders runs for governor not with campaign appearances but campaign executive sessions. She runs not on freedom of information, but freedom from it. Hers.
I'm old enough to remember when Bill Clinton ran for governor with me tagging along, covering all his sessions, even the one in Fordyce that time with the timber-industry people who were mad at him.
The news article in this paper Thursday said efforts to reach Sanders on Wednesday to seek more specific information on the issue of the day were not successful.
I'm also old enough to remember a governor who would text back with an answer when you texted him with a question. Named Asa or some such.
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.