Asa Hutchinson appeared on one national television news show too many.
Sharing his near-weekly version of Sunday-morning wisdom on "Meet the Press" on NBC, he managed only to stick out his nose and his state's for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to bloody.
She, appearing after him and asked to reply to his segment, delivered the blow.
In Asa's defense, AOC had the advantage of data and passionately held views. Asa's tactically finessed spiel of strong conservatism pureed with inclusion and practicality works for some things, but not abortion.
Many Arkansas readers will dismiss this column pre-emptively on its mention of Ocasio-Cortez. They'll apply ad hominem attacks without listening to her case.
Getting attacked on national television by AOC will make Asa more popular than ever in Arkansas. But his contention that his Sunday-morning TV appearances are good for the state was rather severely contradicted in this case.
Ocasio-Cortez told viewers that Arkansas, while one of the poorest and least-healthy states in the country, preaches pro-life for fetuses while its mothers die in childbirth at disproportionately high rates. She said the state delivers one in four of its actually born children to poverty, a percentage likely now to grow.
Hutchinson began his largely disastrous segment by saying how wonderful it was that the Supreme Court had ruled to repeal Roe v. Wade. He closed it by saying the Republican Party should be a big tent not pushing a federal ban on abortion but letting states decide.
In between, amid that straddle, when pressed on particulars delving beneath the kinder-than-Trump persona with which he hopes to pursue the presidency, he either revealed or feigned a lack of awareness of the full complexity of the issue.
The governor blithely dismissed women's fears about the expanse of the state's blanket ban on abortion that his grandstanding attorney general certified Friday as the immediate law of the state. It grants an exception only to save the life of the mother.
He assumed that the morning-after pill and IUDs are contraception, and, on that basis, blew off as nonsense the idea that they might be restricted by this ruling and the new Arkansas law. He didn't seem to consider that the medication and device have been alleged, by the way they work, to amount to abortion.
He said, oh, sure, Arkansas doctors may keep deciding best medical practices for miscarriages. But how could he be so sure with only an exception to save the "life," not the "health," of the mother?
He didn't even try to reconcile the trigger law's lack of an exception for rape or incest, even as he has said he supports such an exception. He said now was not the time for worrying about that. He said we can take up side matters later.
Let's hope no girl or woman gets impregnated by rape while we're not concerning ourselves with her.
Ocasio-Cortez assaulted the very idea that Hutchinson and the Arkansas Republican Legislature care about women. She said the state has the nation's third-highest maternal mortality rate and that 71 percent of its mothers who die in childbirth are Black. (The latest data I saw said Arkansas' rate was the nation's fifth-highest.)
Third or fifth, she said any reasonable application of those statistics to increased numbers of forced pregnancies means simply that more Arkansas women will die without Roe v. Wade.
Fortunately for Asa and Arkansas, Ocasio-Cortez's segment extended beyond her takedown of him and it.
Typically diving into self-marginalizing overstatement, she said the bigger issue is a "crisis of democracy" because Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh said during their confirmation processes that Roe v. Wade was settled law.
She said they thus lied under oath in a constitutional process and that we ought to consider impeachment.
I don't know what either of those justices said in private meetings with U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Manchin, who seem to believe they were specifically lied to. But I do know that statements that are true only as far as they go--such as their public one that Roe v. Wade is settled law--are standard tactical fare.
The statement doesn't say the justices are committing to keeping the law settled.
The crisis for democracy isn't that a couple of Republican operatives diced up the full truth in their marches to Supreme Court confirmation. It is that there isn't democracy in America.
Donald Trump got fewer people's votes for president than Hillary Clinton in 2016. Yet he was the electoral winner by rules that devalue simple American human beings and emphasize instead the arbitrarily varying values of arbitrarily sized sets of American human beings. He then worked with a Senate controlled by Republicans who cumulatively got fewer votes than Democratic senators.
If the people had gotten their way, Hillary Clinton would have nominated three justices confirmed by a Democratic Senate. Most likely, her choices would have ruled differently.
And Asa and Arkansas wouldn't have had bloody Sunday.
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.