Here fly the latest fickle arrows of conventional wisdom.
They are timed to take stock after the primaries and provide traditional aid and comfort to the columnist in meeting the early deadline pressure of a long holiday weekend.
But y'all say you like them. So I like to think of this as more a reader service than a crutch.
U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor--We have completed essentially the first quarter of this epic race that perhaps will decide the majority in the U.S. Senate. By all rights, Pryor should be losing, burdened as he is by Obamacare.
But he is leading in nearly all polls, and by several points in a few. It's because he has successfully made the race as much about his extremist opponent as about himself.
And did you know that Tom Cotton wants to raise the age for eligibility for Social Security and Medicare to 70? If not, then you must have been under extended anesthesia.
U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton--It's something of a parlor trick: How can a Republican not win in Arkansas right now?
He remains aloof and abrupt and unappealing. He has charming, engaging parents--somehow--but there are but two of them and he's now played both those cards.
Asa Hutchinson--He had the television screen to himself for about three weeks and used it well with positive ads about himself and his agenda. He has a money disadvantage, but the Republican Governors Association will subsidize him as long as he is doing this well in the polls. The fourth time is potentially the charm.
But he has his own incremental version of Cotton's parlor trick. If Arkansas had an instinctively good feeling about him, then he wouldn't have lost three of three statewide races.
Mike Ross--Don't underestimate him, the parachuting reporter from the National Journal said. So true.
On primary night he fell over himself to get on KATV's coverage not once, not twice, but three times--hammering his talking points as if programmed on each occasion.
He wants to be the education governor. We need pre-K education and we need post-secondary education. We need tax reform. We need to make this race about Arkansas and not partisan bickering. He is proud to be a Democrat. He is going to take his message to all 75 counties. Et cetera. Et cetera.
He is politically skilled. You don't drive Bill Clinton around and not learn a little something.
French Hill--The best performer of the primary, he won the Republican congressional nomination in the Second District without a runoff.
He did so largely on the strength of a smart television commercial that pre-emptively attacked his actual resume as a rich banker to impose a fabricated image of a guy in jeans whose clunker won't start.
Yes, the vintage Volvo that won't turn over in the morning--it's a classic Arkansas working-man tale.
Ann Clemmer--It turns out she could have voted for the private option.
Robin Wynne--He goes to the Arkansas Supreme Court by having passively ridden--and coweringly having declined to denounce--the stealth out-of-state money that slandered his opponent as soft on child pornography.
If the Supreme Court is to be genuinely supreme--credible, venerated--then it needs nobler membership than that. He could have denounced the tactic and won by a larger margin.
A worthy Supreme Court judge would rise to the right thing no matter what his cynical political consultant said. High-court membership ought to trump cynical, small-time political consulting.
Wynne's message is that the way to the Supreme Court is to get lucky and have the mystery outsiders attack not you, but the other guy, presumably because you are more acceptable to them in whatever their mystery political interests might be.
Dreadful. Just dreadful.
State Rep. Bruce Westerman--He won the Republican congressional nomination in the 4th District despite his opponent's having wholly fabricated a ludicrous charge that he championed the private option and Obamacare.
The Arkansas Republican Party--It has personally flawed candidates for the U.S. Senate and governor. They manage to take less than full advantage of the generally raging Republicanism of our emerging Oklabama, a phrase I like to use to reflect our insistence on combining the worst of those political wastelands of Oklahoma and Alabama.
But that's not the worst of it. Nominating a crude and unqualified candidate like Dennis Milligan for treasurer to handle billions of dollars--and rejecting an ethically pristine and eminently qualified alternative like Duncan Baird--indicates the Republicans are no better able than Democrats to avoid putting political hangers-on in this ministerial office that shouldn't be elected in the first place.
Ethics, integrity--Wynne's tactical passivity and ensuing victory, Baird's ethical obsession and ensuing defeat, Milligan's victory for treasurer after having tried to bully Baird out of the race, Westerman's margin sustaining a precipitous reduction by attacks that simply made up a brazenly bogus charge that he favored Obamacare ... well, voters who decry the cynical dysfunction of our politics may need to turn introspective.
Us--We have seen the cynical dysfunction and we are it.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/25/2014