This business with Asa Hutchinson and a rape and incest exception for abortion goes back contentiously to ... well, my heavens, it's been 36 years.
The conventional wisdom that Hutchinson hasn't changed politically over those nearly four decades, but that the essence of American conservatism has shifted to his right impractically, is generally true, but not so in this case.
As a 35-year-old Reaganite right-winger and U.S. attorney, Hutchinson was the Republican challenger to U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers' re-election in 1986. He plainly outdid the oratorically gifted Bumpers in a televised debate. I said so as a first-year columnist, though I phrased the assessment grudgingly, saying Hutchinson could always say after taking his whipping at the polls in November that at least he'd beaten the fabled Bumpers in a debate.
At a celebratory news conference after the debate, things quickly broke down for the youthful Asa.
Reporters--not me, for I was more interested in the general debate outcome and its potential effect--focused on Hutchinson's saying in the debate that he opposed abortion with only one exception, to save the life of the mother. Bumpers, in his best if perhaps only flourish of the evening, replied that, if a drug-crazed lunatic broke into your home and raped and impregnated your daughter, Asa would force your daughter to have that baby.
So, at his "we-won" news conference, Hutchinson's posture and tone suddenly turned defensive.
Though previously not much interested in the abortion exchange, I found that I needed to ask a follow-up on rape and incest--sincerely, I promise, to clarify a point. At that point a man to the side of me I later learned was Asa's brother Tim, barked, "He already answered that; he already answered that."
Asa wound up walking off after asking if anybody had a question on any other subject, and no one immediately did.
He probably saw that at the time--in the way start-out conservative politicians at a high level see such things--as a cynical effort by the liberal media to change the subject from his otherwise triumphant night. I don't think that was it. I was pretty much innocent either way, as usual.
When he came back to run for attorney general in 1990, Hutchinson favored three abortion exceptions--rape, incest and life of the mother. He told me Monday that he'd been consistent since that time.
And I was thinking, yeah, all the way to CNN on Sunday, except that, last year, you signed Jason Rapert's trigger bill to make abortion illegal in Arkansas without rape and incest exceptions the minute the U.S. Supreme Court permits it--that minute coming apparently any second now.
But I know his veto would have been overridden immediately and overwhelmingly, and I guess I can get, if not admire, his aversion to going through that.
So, Sunday was a big day for Hutchinson. An analysis in The Washington Post that ranked the top 10 GOP presidential prospects for 2024 had him cracking the group at No. 10. Tom Cotton wasn't ranked. The Post sized up Asa as unlikely but interesting with his fashioning of a post-Trump conservatism of pragmatic problem-solving and tolerantly moderate underpinning.
Then he made his near-regular appearance on CNN's "State of the Union," at which time he took a risk by trying to fashion a pragmatic position on the famously absolutism- afflicted issue of abortion. He said that Arkansas trigger law would be revisited after such a Supreme Court ruling. He said the absence of a rape and incest exception would cause a lot of heartbreak if applied to the post-Roe v. Wade world.
He said--and follow this closely--that, while he believed unborn children should be legally protected from abortion, the fact was that abortion would be more politically acceptable, resulting in more unborn children being saved in the long run, if a compassionate exception was granted women in cases of rape and incest.
So, first Asa got ranked in the top 10 of GOP presidential wannabes for his unique message of post-Trump pragmatism. Then he promptly went on network TV and tried to apply that concept to the real world, where abortion polarizes like nothing else and many conservative Republicans contend that the tragic criminal circumstance of an unborn child's conception is no fault of that unborn child and no license to take away its innocent life.
I suspect that, if his presidential campaign actually takes shape and shows any traction, Hutchinson will find himself in the national context amid the same kind of hostility, but stronger and from the opposite direction, that had him cutting short a celebratory news conference 36 years ago in Arkansas. He'd be less huffy now, I predict.
If he intends to try to slice the abortion issue quite so finely, with mathematical and political calculations introduced to a right-and-wrong question, then it's probably best he get all that out on the table early to see if abortion pragmatism's blowback might be survivable in contemporary American politics.
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.