Last week's column emphasized the perils of trying to predict the Democratic and Republican nominees a year before the party conventions.
So it makes perfect sense in this week's to ignore that advice and do a little handicapping, at least for the more wide-open and crowded Republican side.
Here, then, are the odds on the GOP field, starting with the longest of long shots.
• Former New York Governor George Pataki (500-1): Why is he running? Has anyone noticed?
• Donald Trump (250-1): Charles Krauthammer has predicted that the media will focus on Trump and his antics to discredit the GOP field. National Review's John Fund has half-seriously suggested that he might be a "double-agent" working for the Democrats.
Whatever the case, that "The Donald" chose to take his clown act into the Republican side rather than the Democratic (he was, after all, a registered Democrat for many years) probably says something less than flattering about the GOP.
• South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (200-1): Graham will supposedly add foreign-policy gravitas to the Republican competition, but former UN ambassador John Bolton would have been a far better source for that.
• Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (200-1): Yes, he was the runner-up to Mitt Romney in 2012, but that was only because he was part of arguably the weakest group to seek a major party's nomination in American history.
No one who lost their Senate re-election bid by more than 17 points (as Santorum did in Pennsylvania in 2006) is ever going to win their party's presidential nomination. If such were possible, the Democrats would be considering Blanche Lincoln or Mark Pryor.
• Ben Carson (150-1): The retired neurosurgeon is an admirable man but, alas, also the most obvious victim of the influence of Barack Obama--we won't elect two black presidents in a row and will now, in the wake of Barack Obama's serial incompetence, want a president with more experience in public office (Carson has none).
Still, we can't help but wonder how much better American race relations would be if someone with Carson's views had become our first black president rather than someone with Obama's.
• Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (100-1): Only a few years ago, Jindal was a rising star of the Republican Party with serious White House prospects. But he has recently struggled to find his footing and to fashion a distinctive message for a national audience.
Jindal can talk policy with the best wonk and has fought the good fight against the Obama administration on a range of issues (including education), but governor is probably as far as he goes.
• Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (80-1): If 2016 is the "year of the woman" (as Hillary Clinton fervently hopes), then being the only female in a crowded GOP field certainly helps. Thus far, Fiorina has proven to be a much more effective campaigner than anyone anticipated and should prove formidable in the debates.
On the downside, Fiorina, like Ben Carson, has never held public office and badly lost her bid for the U.S. Senate to a highly vulnerable Barbara Boxer in California in 2010. Her tenure at Hewlett-Packard, central to her leadership claims, has also been subject to extensive criticism.
• Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (60-1): It's always a mistake to underestimate Huckabee, a talented political entrepreneur with a certain winning glibness and earnestness that comes through on the campaign trail and in televised debates.
But to win the Republican nomination, you have to adequately cover the three pillars of conservatism that Ronald Reagan united: free-market economics, a strong national defense/foreign policy, and social conservatism.
Huckabee will again be the darling of social conservatives, but he fails miserably when it comes to the first pillar--if anything, his economic populism is almost indistinguishable these days from that of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
This is because Huckabee isn't really a conservative at all; he's a big government populist in the mold of William Jennings Bryan, which also means he might be in the wrong party, and perhaps even the wrong century.
• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (40-1): It would have been bizarre to relegate Christie to the second tier just a few years ago, but even then there were concerns that his Tony Soprano political style and overall pugnaciousness would wear thin over time.
And so it has. His approval rating in the latest Fairleigh Dickinson poll has dropped all the way to 30 percent in New Jersey; which is a rather peculiar position from which to launch a bid for the nation's highest office.
The hunch is that no governor that unpopular in his own state is going to fare well in others.
It's likely that one or two of these long-shots will experience a surge or "boomlet" of some kind at some point, if only because the media gets bored and likes to shake things up now and then.
But, in the end, about the only way they end up on the November 2016 ballot is in the VP slot (Fiorina? Carson?).
Or if Trump, always seeking attention, launches an ego-driven third-party bid. Because everyone is a moron, stupid, and a loser. Except him.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 06/29/2015