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She doesn’t pay a lot of attention to politics, but she remembered his name.

“The green balloons guy?� she asked.

Indeed. Jetton, a former Missouri speaker of the House, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault in 2011 for an incident that started as a consensual affair involving rough sex and turned into a crime. “Green balloons� was the safe word that Jetton and the woman used, or were supposed to.

It was a fast and embarrassing fall for the son of a Baptist preacher who rose to become one of Missouri’s most powerful politicians. He fell to the bottom — of politics and life — in the blink of an eye. The last time the two of us met for coffee, it was in Cape Girardeau around the time of that fall. He spilled his guts, giving me details that would eventually become his redemption story.

We met again this week. Jetton is back, having been hired by current Speaker of the House Dean Plocher.

Plocher is trying to recover from his own scandals, including taking several thousand dollars in travel reimbursements from the state for costs that were already paid by his campaign. Plocher has paid the money back and is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee. He hopes Jetton can help turn his political prospects around.

It’s a curious hire, not because Jetton doesn’t have the talent for the job, but because a scandal-plagued speaker hiring a scandal-plagued former speaker is two times more scandal in one sentence than a politician would typically like to see.

Jetton is a charming man who owns his past sins. He knows he’s entering a hornet’s nest. The scandal headlines will come and go. That’s not Plocher’s biggest problem. It’s this: What does the recycling of Jetton say about the state of the Republican Party?

State Sen. Bill Eigel, R-Cottleville, has an answer for that question, and it’s not a good one.

Eigel, who is running for governor, is an extremist. He wants his party to fight every culture war, treat Democrats as enemies and trample on any Republican who doesn’t kowtow to the furthest right-wing positions. But he’s not wrong about something he posted on social media the other day.

Gov. Mike Parson, a fellow Republican who is about the only elected official left who served with Jetton in the House, was bragging in a radio interview about the state of the economy. Parson is supporting one of Eigel’s opponents in the gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe. The winner will likely face Crystal Quade, the Springfield Democrat who is the House Minority Leader.

“Missouri is in the best shape of any state in the United States,� Parson said.

I like it when Missouri’s governor cheerleads for the state. But Parson is simply wrong, by most objective factors. Eigel called him on it, using a document that came directly from Parson’s Department of Economic Development.

“Missouri’s growth in GDP and productivity has been below the nation and Missouri’s Midwestern peers since 2010,� said the document, which is seeking consulting help to pull the state out of its economic doldrums.

That year — 2010 — is the one after Jetton vacated the speaker’s chair. He was the second in a long line of Republican speakers who, for more than two decades, have held a majority or super-majority in the House and Senate. Instead of an economic nirvana of milk and honey trickling down from Republican tax cuts, Missouri has instead won the race to the bottom.

The state is, or has been recently, last in higher education spending, teacher pay, public health spending and pay for corrections officials. It’s first in the sort of categories that bring embarrassment, such as poor kids being cut off Medicaid.

Eigel would likely make all of these things worse, but sometimes it helps to have an extremist take on the establishment so the entire party can look in the mirror.

Missouri’s economic numbers aren’t Democratic numbers or Republican numbers. They’re just facts.

So when a Republican speaker of the house tries to bill Missouri taxpayers for travel expenses his campaign donors already paid, and then tries to get out of it by hiring a guy who suffered through his own scandals, it says something about how he views those taxpayers.

Jetton can’t fix that problem. But his presence is a connection to the early days of Republican rule in Missouri, when the economic numbers began to fall. Jetton’s hiring is a stark reminder that when it comes to the state of the Missouri economy, Republicans have only themselves to blame.