Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear was big-dogging it last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His legislature back home was saying he cared more about being global and fancy than dealing with the real issues affecting real people in Kentucky.

Our governor, Sarah Sanders, was Beshear’s partner for a conversation at this elite forum before international business leaders. They were talking about states’ dealings with the new American presidency.

She was un-pestered by such backhome provincialism. Arkansas has either progressed or regressed from the days when we called Bill Clinton “too big for his britches” because he’d ventured ambitiously into national or global venues.

It could be that Sanders has lost a lot of weight and fits easily into her britches. Or, more likely, everything has changed about American and Arkansas politics.

The performance of them is now the same. You govern Arkansas with 100% devotion to Donald Trump, who leads the nation with 100% devotion to Donald Trump.

The fact is that any American governor would spend time well by attending this forum and raising his or her state’s visibility with this invitation-only worldwide audience.

Sanders might want to make a campaign ad of the moderator’s asking about her advocacy of a ban on smartphones for children during school hours and saying it was — for his children’s sake — the one reason he might move to Arkansas.

She did miss a chance to say, “There are a helluva lot more reasons than that, buddy boy,” which kind of sounds like her.

She was on another panel at the forum to discuss children’s mental health from the perspective of smartphone addiction. That’s the one issue with enough oomph to lift her from status as a hardened Trump agent, which she seems to find satisfactory, to a more expansive political figure in her own right.

When I praised her no-phonesat-school position in my mid-week visit with a roomful of mostly liberals, the nods were enthusiastic and near universal.

It’s never too early to yearn for being shed of Trump. The BeshearSanders pairing struck me as possibly our next all-new presidential choice.

He is a pragmatic, mildly left-ofcenter Democratic governor who probably would have been a better running mate for Kamala Harris than Tim Walz. He seems to be in the early stretching phase for a run.

Sanders answered almost every question with Trump talking points. That served her back home in Arkansas while serving her well globally as an ally and agent of the transformative new American president.

Her specific advocacy for Arkansas was standard hyperbole — No. 1 in this, No. 1 in that. As pointed out in this space after her State of the State address, boasting factually that Arkansas merely is upwardly bound in state rankings simply doesn’t measure up to her rhetorical standards.

Beshear, on the other hand, was impressive in his ability to fashion answers that found the sweet spot between being understated in Trump criticism and thoughtful with his own ideas.

On the so-called “woke culture” in contemporary corporations, Beshear said his job as governor was to be supportive and helpful to a business in his state that made the private decision to set goals on diversity, equity and inclusion, but to be officially neutral at the state government level.

Sanders’ position was that she was for private rights, too, but that the problem had been the Biden administration’s imposing such “woke” practices.

They said pretty much the same thing, from different parties and with different inflections, but Beshear appeared fresh while Sanders seemed rote. They essentially tied on the issue, which, if I read decisive swing voters correctly, is an improvement for Democrats.

In the matter of swing voters, Beshear analyzed the election by saying “movable” late-deciding voters had a “gut-check” moment and went with the feeling that a Trump presidency would be more helpful to their paying their bills than a Democratic presidency. But, about that, Beshear said tariffs on Canada would run up Americans’ fuel costs, and tariffs on Mexico would run up Americans’ food costs, and that those “movable” voters would judge Trump on the economy mainly at the gasoline pump and in the supermarket.

That’s a pretty good analysis, a kind of less-soulful Clintonism.

Sanders and Beshear seemed to agree substantively when she said Trump would succeed because he is, in the end, “a great dealmaker,” and he said Trump’s tariff talk was not about a trade imbalance as much as it was negotiating leverage more broadly. I’ve written as much lately, essentially, by saying we must, in this second goround, pay less attention to Trump’s running his mouth and more on what gets done.

It was altogether a good discussion, generally better for Beshear but specifically better for Sanders in that she was the one who had the moderator talking about moving to her state — if only to get his kids off their phones.