I sit the day after the primary in front of a luncheon audience of the Central Arkansas Political Animals Club at the Governor's Mansion.
I wonder why a man so politically out-of-touch would be asked to be here. I feel better-suited for cowering under my desk at home with my hands over my ears to shut out the sounds of Arkansas voting returns going cha-ching.
Mainly I listen to the two more-learned panelists--Republican political consultant Robert Coon and University of Central Arkansas political science professor Dr. Heather Yates. I am struck by their dispassion. They offer non-pejorative explanations for everything.
I come armed only with the observation that Arkansas has gone crazy.
I get asked by moderator Roby Brock: How is it that U.S. Sen. John Boozman got up to 58 percent to stave off the rising alternative unconventional conservative Republicanism that Coon has just quantified as rising from 30 percent in 2018 to nearly 40 percent in the combined performances of extremist outsiders Jake Bequette and Jan Morgan?
I have only the stale lament that Boozman owed it all to the Donald Trump endorsement. So, I make myself a backup moderator rather than panelist.
I ask the other panelists: It seems that Boozman did so by selling himself wholesale to his Trump endorsement, leading me to wonder whether the story would have been different if he had never received that endorsement or lost it after that hidden camera caught him mumbling the truth that Trump lost the presidential election in 2020.
They say, basically, that he'd have lost a few points but stayed above 50 percent because, after all, he still had his old campaign manager and pal, Sarah Sanders.
She got him the Trump endorsement. She protected it for him after the truth-telling misfortune. Even if Trump had taken the endorsement away, Sanders would have stayed in Boozman's corner, happily appeared in that commercial for him and surely talked Trump out of endorsing one of the others.
Coon says one big story of the primary was Sanders' restoration of the Trump energy that had cooled a bit. He marvels that she received nearly 300,000 votes in a midterm Arkansas Republican primary, getting more votes than anyone on the ballot. The uncommonly strong GOP turnout was less a matter of crossovers from Democrats and independents than simply because of her, he says.
I use my phone to check him on that. Usually the largest vote-getter in such a primary is an incumbent associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court with a weak opponent who reaps reams of default votes by appearing on both party ballots for the nonpartisan office.
Surely, I suspect, Coon meant that Sanders pulled more votes than anyone other than Associate Justice Karen Baker, who, apparently without campaigning, creamed challenger Gunner DeLay because he didn't have any money to spread the word that he was the conservative Republican. And no outside dark-money group had come in for him with an attack ad on television based on some cynical exploitation of an old ruling in which Baker had participated.
So, Coon is right about that too. In the GOP primary, Sanders got 288,813 votes. In the Supreme Court race appearing on both party ballots, Baker, with a weak opponent, got 261,618 votes.
Apparently Coon had spent the morning studying returns rather than cowering under his desk.
One thing occurs to me and another hits me. What occurs is that Hal Bass, Sanders' political science professor at Ouachita, had told me that she is a "superb political athlete."
What hits me is that she is now the boss of Arkansas, even transcendent of Trump.
He's damaged by Jan. 6, 2021, and encountering spots of resentment in his primary endorsements. She just re-seated a U.S. senator from Arkansas. Her state legislative endorsees--right wingers all--uniformly won or led tickets to runoffs.
I recall Sanders telling me that, sure, there might be a Trump appearance for her in the state ... if she needs it.
She hasn't needed it. Instead, he might now need for her to do a rally for him if he runs for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 and needs delegates from the Arkansas primary.
Now there are snippets in the national press that she's on Trump's short list for a running mate. I'm assuming at this point they mean bottom, not top, of that ticket.
Moderator Brock asks me if, by posing my question to the other panelists and reaping their discussion, "we've given you your next column."
Looks like. It's better than hiding under your desk with your hands over your ears.
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.