Some of the bigger-time pundits are saying Hillary Clinton didn't do as well in the debate Tuesday night as it appeared.
Part of the pundit motivation--as I can attest--is that commentators must say something. And the thing they say today needs to be different from what everyone was saying yesterday.
But needing to fill space is not necessarily the same as filling space needlessly. Sometimes, up against the gun, a pundit can reach deep for profundity he never knew he had.
So let's consider what some are saying, which essentially is that it's all about the matchup.
It is that Republicans won't give Clinton a pass as Bernie Sanders did on the emails, about which he famously proclaimed he didn't care.
It is that Republicans won't perform as altogether pitiably as those three other odd individuals who took up screen space for no discernible reason Tuesday night.
And it is that Hillary will be haunted in the general election, when appeal to the center matters most, by allowing the socialist Bernie to pull her to the left.
So now let's take those assertions in order.
It is quite true that Republicans won't give Clinton a pass on the emails, or on Benghazi, or on pantsuits, or on anything else. Republicans wouldn't know what to do if they weren't able to make character assaults on somebody named Clinton.
And it is true that Republicans know how to frame those assaults in such a way as to peel points off Hillary in the polls. We know that because Kevin McCarthy told us.
So, yes, acclamation for Hillary ought to be deferred, at least until her session testifying before the Benghazi committee this week.
One more exasperated "what difference could it possibly make?"--of which she is ever capable, considering the utter contempt for her interrogators that will be on the tip of her tongue--could resuscitate Joe Biden's Hamlet act.
And, yes, it's always possible that one of these email dumps will show ... something.
But effective character assault does not necessarily spell defeat for the assaulted one. Bill Clinton's character had been so thoroughly and effectively assaulted in 1992 that polls showed more Americans distrusting than trusting him at the time they went to the polls and elected him president.
You can win with more than half the people unable to trust or abide you. Sometimes the people will weigh the field and choose to hold their noses and take a chance on you.
A presidential race comes down to three things.
One is a prevailing public mood, which, at present, is uncommonly hostile to politics as usual, of which the negative character assault is a prime and offending example.
So it might well be that Bernie's saying he's sick of the blather about Hillary's emails connects with weary swing voters more than a Republican attack alleging Hillary to be singularly responsible for China and Russia and Benghazi and Bret Bielema.
The second essential element of a presidential race is the lesser-of-evil choice that inevitably emerges--after the two parties finish spending rich people's billions to smear each other.
Whatever the Republicans can do to Hillary is generally akin to what the Democrats can do to the Republican nominee. That's unless it's Trump. Or Carson. Or Cruz. Or Huckabee.
They've already done it to themselves.
The third thing an American presidential election comes down to is what Ohioans and Floridians think. They are our selection surrogates. The rest of us are mere spectators.
If you want to matter in a presidential race, then become a swing state. I'm doing my part to make Arkansas one.
But I'm not getting much help.
As for that analysis that Republicans won't perform against Hillary as pitiably as Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, I would agree as long as the Republicans to whom you're referring are Marco Rubio and Carla Fiorina--my dream, which is to say nightmare, GOP ticket.
Hillary can handily dispatch the rest of them.
And as for the supposedly fatal flaw of Hillary's allowing Bernie to nudge her leftward, I would point out that--contrary to the distorting conservatism that rages all around us locally--the national general electorate is leftward, as evidenced by the Democrats getting more votes than the Republicans in every presidential race from 1992 onward except in 2004, which was close.
On guns and abortion, the noise is with the Republicans, especially in flyover red states. But the actual nationwide votes, at least in a heavy presidential turnout, which we surely will have, are with the Democrats.
That's not to say we're becoming socialists. But, you know, Bernie really is moving the Americans' political earth there just a little.
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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 10/18/2015