Pam Whitaker got this newspaper's editorial endorsement for state treasurer last week. But then a hired falsifier for an insurrectionist got that Sunday for governor.
To brag or not to brag?
Whitaker's distinction is that she is a Democrat and the newspaper typically endorses a near-straight Republican ticket.
The endorsement essentially explained that Whitaker was the choice because Mark Lowery is her opponent, which is a decent reason.
Lowery is an unctuous Republican state legislator who has been cited three times for ethics violations and has two personal bankruptcy filings on his resume.
He defends himself by saying the ethics failings weren't of ethics, but paperwork. He dismisses the bankruptcies as youth and bad luck.
Treasurer is a job that could be handled as a division of the Finance and Administration Department. The office has mainly existed to provide a job to political hangers-on with enough sense to hire reasonably competent people to handle the mostly clerical duties of taking in the money and punching it up for the proper account.
In a recent joint interview of the candidates on Arkansas PBS, Whitaker said there were trust issues with Lowery, though she didn't hammer what those were.
He, flailing about in response for a cultural-right angle, which is about all Republicans know, said she might use the office to direct state investments away from the fossil fuel industry.
That seems absurd. But let us stipulate that the treasurer does deposit spare state cash in financial institutions, which is what got one treasurer, Martha Shoffner, into trouble a near-decade ago.
The feds arrested her one day at her Newport home after they observed a finance guy making a call to her door to drop off a pie that, it turned out, contained $6,000.
Evidence was that Shoffner had been directing state funds to the pie delivery man's financial firm. He was kicking back cash-infused pie fillings.
She did some time in federal prison.
Day to day, though, a treasurer could get by trusting competent people to do boring work while he, or she, took children on tours of the big vault and handed them bundles of crisp bills and said, "You ever held $60,000 before, little man? Hey, come back here, kid. Somebody stop that little tow-headed rascal."
Even the current treasurer, Dennis Milligan, could get the job done over eight years. He was elected in 2014 as a Republican hanger-on over Duncan Baird, an uncommonly competent and ethically conscientious young Republican legislator.
Milligan, whose calling card was that he was a state Republican Party chairman, tried to pressure Baird out of that GOP primary on the basis of a state Capitol security video. Baird was trailing in a small group of Republican legislators, two of them carrying cups, who went through Capitol security in the wee hours for some kind of irregularly timed tour. They wanted to go to the roof, but weren't allowed.
And with them, Milligan pointed out disapprovingly, were two females not wives of any of the legislators. So, he told Baird, at a doughnut-shop meeting Baird audio-recorded, that the young man would get out the race and no one would be any the wiser.
Baird stayed in the race because this had been but an innocent if silly Capitol incursion.
Many of the same GOP primary voters who nominated Lowery this time nominated Milligan over Baird that time.
Let us stipulate that Arkansas voters are not squeamish about their state treasurers.
Baird went on to run the state government pension system for several years and then get hired by Walmart to run its 401(k) program. Milligan now runs to move down the hall to be state auditor, another hangout for a hanger-on.
Meantime, Whitaker and Lowery recently received a letter from Milligan asking them not to visit the treasurer's office because it makes his employees nervous for their jobs.
Anyway, the point is that I sat for an hour for a pleasant lunch Saturday with Whitaker.
You can't properly assess a person over an hour's lunch. You can merely relate that she seems nice and that asking her to relate her professional experience is a mistake if one intends to talk about much else over the hour.
She tells a story of academic and professional accomplishment and adventure as a divorced mother who has had to relocate or change jobs to tend to personal circumstances and gender-based impediments.
But Whitaker can cite experience as a project manager both for Lockheed--on fighter-jet software--and the IRS, which has the advantage of sounding relevant to being state treasurer.
Anyone but Lowery is reasonable editorial judgment. But my limited observation is that Whitaker might have something to offer beyond that.
A postscript: Lowery tells me I can drop the speculation that Jason Rapert might be his chief of staff. Nothing to that, he says.
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.