Political staffer and former Arkansas first daughter Sarah Huckabee Sanders is running for governor of her native state, but there’s already a Republican candidate there who is better qualified, better funded, smarter, more personable, and more honest.
Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin has done a lot more in his career than tell fibs for a president, work on failed presidential campaigns, and grow up with one’s father as governor. Indeed, no matter who runs against Griffin, it’s hard to imagine anyone with experience, skills, and judgment better suited for the job than Griffin’s.
A colonel in the Army Reserve who served in Mosul, Iraq, Griffin is a former congressman, former U.S. attorney, and former top presidential aide with graduate degrees from Tulane (law) and the U.S. Army War College (master’s) after graduating from Arkansas’s Hendrix College. His list of charitable board service is long, and his Arkansas roots five generations old. He’s a solid conservative pushing a bold plan to phase out the state income tax, with a record both in Congress and in Arkansas of delivering constructive, conservative results.
I’ve watched Griffin’s career since he graduated from Tulane Law School in 1994, I consulted his expertise when I worked for the right-leaning Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1997, and I admired his priorities years later as he relinquished a promising career in Congress because he didn’t want to be away so much from his young family in Arkansas. He has always been refreshingly approachable and also refreshingly transparent. He has sort of a guileless ambition: He wants to do big things and wants to be an important voice, but he wears the ambition lightly, without subterfuge or cynicism.
His attitude is that of someone asking others to join him on an adventure to do great things. If you don’t, it’s no big deal, but if you do, well, heck, it’s gonna be a whirlwind of hard-working fun. And even when he wants to draw policy distinctions with opponents, he’s not likely to take personal potshots. When Sanders entered the race, he said, “We all value Sarah Sanders’s political work in Washington and appreciate her. I welcome her to the race for governor and am glad that she’s back in Little Rock.”
The scene that will always define Griffin to me, though, came in 2000 when he was deputy research director for the Republican National Committee in the race against Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore. I was on a quick foray to Washington, D.C., from my perch as editorial writer for Alabama’s Mobile Register. I met Griffin in his office as part of my “rounds,” gathering campaign fodder. I’ve never seen a simultaneous multitasker quite like him.
As I sat across his desk, Griffin quite literally talked into his phone, sent and received emails, and read incoming faxes with quick, sideways glances as they spooled out, all while carrying on a conversation with me in which my questions and his extremely on-point answers all flowed as naturally as if none of those other distractions existed. Griffin was keeping four things in his head at once, with the aplomb for each as if each had his full attention. And there was no rudeness in it; he did it with a smile and the attitude of someone relaxing on his front porch.
It was extraordinary.
Sanders may have high-profile national connections, but Griffin already has $1.7 million in cash on hand, along with key endorsements from locals more interested in someone attuned to home-state issues rather than someone lately more part of the Washington circus. For very good reason, Griffin will be hard to beat.
