Scrappin’ for a fight

Sarah Huckabee Sanders picked, or has pretended to pick, a fight with this newspaper’s opinion department.

It’s none of my business. I’m a mere contract columnist for the op-ed page who appreciates being able to write what he wants independently.

But I feel obligated to analyze the politics of this development. That’s what I’m supposed to do. And the politics in this episode happens to conform nicely to something I wrote a couple of weeks ago.

It was that modern-day Republicans don’t need or want the mainstream media anymore.

The modern Republican campaign currency is found in steering clear of professional straight-news reporters asking questions that the Republican candidates can’t control. It can be found in writing one’s own story through advertising, social media and conservative-based media.

Or you can try to cover your own campaign, like Sanders.

She has put out numerous news releases only after the fact about supposedly wonderful policy sessions she’s had with specially invited constituents from which actual reporters have been excluded.

It’s not that she can’t have private policy discussions. It’s that you shouldn’t get it both ways, telling reporters they can’t attend, then afterward trying to cram your self-serving version of discussions down our throats.

Modern Republican campaign currency also is found in being free to throw slabs of red meat to the rabid Trumpian base by assailing the mainstream media as liberally biased and worthy of disdain and resentment.

What happened in this case was that Sanders submitted an op-ed piece on education to the paper’s opinion-writing operation in February. The editor or editors opted not to run it on the basis that it was “campaign-y,” meaning, most likely, that it amounted to self-promotional jargon not substantive enough to warrant special appearance on an opinion page.

If it didn’t assail liberals for teaching kids that America has some bad history, by invoking the nation’s stark failures on race, I’d be surprised.

Then, just the other day, nearly six months later, this paper published an op-ed piece from Democratic gubernatorial nominee Chris Jones extolling a teacher raise from surplus funds and faulting Sanders’ practice of not addressing or answering questions about such real issues.

Jones’ piece was about a timely matter in the news, with teachers rallying at the state Capitol and legislators gathering in special session to spend that surplus, but not on teacher raises as a Republican governor had proposed.

The circumstances seem entirely different. But the opinion people can make that point or a better one for themselves if they want.

My speculation—and it’s merely that—is that the publication of Jones’ piece in contrast to the round-filing of Sanders’ in February did not rile Sanders as much as it presented a ripe tactical opportunity to drive home the GOP campaign theme that the press is the enemy.

For her part, Sanders is free to mail that rejected piece to me, and I will consider it for this space.

I would reserve the right to analyze it, as I am analyzing here.

In Sarah’s case, she assails a famously Republican-prone editorial page that probably was going to endorse her and might still, though I may have slipped into matters not my business.

But there is this question from those remembering and not yet over yesteryear: Why would a Republican gubernatorial candidate pick a fight with a Republican-leaning statewide newspaper editorial page that would seem by logic a prospect to endorse her on a Sunday or two before the general election?

It’s because she figures she’s going to win anyway. It’s because newspaper editorial endorsements haven’t mattered much in recent years in the big races that people hold their own informed or misinformed opinions about.

And, in the modern Republican tactical context, Sanders calculates that she gains more in this day and age by fighting a newspaper—any newspaper—than by getting the editorial endorsement of that newspaper, or any newspaper.

All I should say for sure is that this space will not be endorsing Sanders, but Jones, and that Sanders wouldn’t have it any other way.

Apostscript: I should acknowledge a conservative complaint about my previous column on Republicans purposely avoiding media accountability. It was that Joe Biden was the classic avoider of the media in 2020 as he hid in his basement.

He did so in part because of the pandemic, and in part because his aides didn’t trust he could avoid gaffes in frequent interaction with reporters.

That was a matter of one personal circumstance not reflective of Democrats generally or Democrats in Arkansas especially, the latter of whom are desperate for somebody to pay attention to them, even it’s only a reporter assigned by an editor to do it.