Today's column comes from the vantage point of a panelists' table in front of the Political Animals Club at the Governor's Mansion reception hall at noon Tuesday.
I was looking out on a couple of hundred politically engaged local people encompassing both partisan persuasions.
What I'd just done, in response to a question, was analyze that the Republican presidential primary climate is more volatile than any I recall.
Usually the Republicans' zanier right-wing fringes, which are substantial, flirt through a few or even several state primaries or caucuses with the goofier and more marginalized presidential candidates--Buchanan, Huckabee, Cain, Bachmann, Santorum. Then, through mainstream dominance, the party settles by the fourth quarter on a return to order, on the inevitable, uninspiring and pre-designated white guy--Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney.
But this time the goofy candidates--Donald Trump, Ben Carson--are leading the polls. More to the point, they, when combined with other candidates from outside the Republican establishment or mainstream, consistently garner more than 50 percent of the support.
Beyond that, the designated inevitable fallback white guy is--this time--perhaps even too uninspiring for the assignment, at least in this especially volatile time.
Jeb Bush is the uninspiring and presumably inevitable candidate to whom I was referring, and for whom rich Republican mainstream forces have set up a $100 million super-PAC to carry him through winner-take-all primaries after March 15.
What's different this time is that the agents of disaffection could generate enough staying power to render the inevitably anointed one, particularly this uncommonly uninspiring one, impotent in terms of closing the deal.
I said I'd put down a decent bet for the right odds, which ought to be pretty long, that the establishment would fall back on someone other than Bush, then face a need to negotiate at levels never before undertaken with the zany outsiders.
I was talking about a Marco Rubio-Carly Fiorina ticket--he the establishment alternative to Jeb and she the most credible and substantial of the zanier outsiders.
That was when the vantage point was instructive.
When I invoked a Rubio-Fiorina ticket, I beheld heads nodding all over the room.
There may have been rolled eyes, too, but they were not evident amid all that nodding.
It was as if a lot of the people sitting out there had been thinking the same thing. Or maybe the odds weren't as long as I thought.
But I wasn't quite finished. I went on to say that a Rubio-Fiorina ticket would provide Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare and prove a winner.
I didn't see so many nods on that. People seemed instead to be pondering, or, in the Democrats' cases, dreading.
My reasoning was that a Rubio-Fiorina ticket would provide a vital rebranding for this tired party of the staid old white guy.
It would bestow the GOP with a young Hispanic American as the candidate for president, which ought to stop the heavy GOP hemorrhaging with Hispanics and counter Hillary with an age and freshness contrast. Then it would give the Republicans a tough, well-spoken and arch-conservative woman from the high-level business world as a counter to Hillary Clinton's gender advantage in seeking to become the first woman president.
Some people tout John Kasich as Jeb's or Rubio's running mate because Kasich is the governor of electorally rich and vital Ohio. I have, in fact, so touted. But I'm thinking Fiorina gives excitement and energy and pizzazz to a party otherwise possessed at best of only tiny particles of that. Kasich provides only a leg up in one state, albeit the main one.
So it may that Jeb is being rolled toward the bus that Scott Walker already is under. And it may be that Trump and Carson will fade but Fiorina won't because she is more politically talented and credible.
Or at least that's what had heads nodding at the Governor's Mansion for one brief luncheon earlier this week.
And the inevitable postscript: Democrats now have Fiorina on their radar and are saying she will fade because her resumé is phony.
She brags of working herself up from secretary to chief executive when, in fact, she was the privileged daughter of the Duke Law School dean and worked in summers as a temp-agency secretary while attending college at Stanford pursuing her MBA. That's a little different from Melanie Griffith in Working Girl.
I find Fiorina's overstatement to be within the currently applicable and highly relaxed bounds of permissible political spin--truer than her description of an utterly contrived video of a partial-birth abortion by Planned Parenthood.
She worked her way up from secretary to CEO in much the way I worked my way down from teenaged restaurant busboy to newspaper columnist.
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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 09/24/2015