COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Where the arrows point

Four factors compel this new installment in the occasional series presenting the arrows of conventional wisdom’s ever-fickle fate.

Two have to do with Labor Day.

For one, the holiday offers a traditional time to take a political assessment. The other is that the Labor Day weekend, with Monday as the day off, requires the production of an additional column this week.

Arrows are handy for such purposes. Visits with Bubba McCoy are, too, but I intend to let the old boy’s wisdom percolate for a while longer before we venture east again to tap it.

The third factor is that people seem to like the arrows. As one man put it, he prefers the columns with arrows because then he doesn’t have to read the words.

Finally: College football season starts this weekend, and I often presume to include Razorback fortunes in these arrowed offerings. The last offering’s contrarian downward arrow for the coming Razorback season earned a mention by the famous sports columnist, which made me proud.

So here goes:

Hillary Clinton — If the election were today, she’d win by five to eight points in the nationwide popular vote, and with an Electoral College majority of 316-222. She could win even without Florida and Ohio, but the path is not recommended.

Her win would be based almost entirely on inherent Democratic advantages and Donald Trump’s unfitness for the office.

The historic nature of her election as the nation’s first woman president is being dwarfed by the spectacle of Trump’s outrageous candidacy.

Clinton’s win would be big enough to allow her to claim a governing mandate, except that she has no prevailing policy message. Her candidacy is based solely on her desire to be president and the nation’s imperative not to let Trump anywhere near the nuclear button.

Donald Trump — See immediately preceding item. He is no less an outrage as a candidate for president today than when the state Republican Party invited all the party’s presidential candidates to come to their dinner last year and Trump horrified the party by being the only one to accept.

The next four years — To win merely by not being the other guy, and despite negative ratings around 60 percent, and despite having no penetrating policy message, portends a congressional dysfunction and paralysis exceeding even that which has beset Barack Obama.

Barack Obama — We’ll want him back.

Well, the reasonable among us will.

Little Rock — I speak of transportation. Soon we begin six months of traffic-clogged Hades while the Broadway Bridge is closed.

Meantime, for all the noise otherwise, that 10-lane concrete behemoth of Interstate 30 is coming through Little Rock for the convenience of cross-country traffic and to permit the consolidation of local vehicular traffic rather than to disperse it and emphasize alternative modes. It’s what the city fathers want. They’ve all signed on. They pretend to have extracted concessions in the entrance-exit design.

U.S. Sen. John Boozman — The Trump debacle drags down Republican senatorial incumbents in more responsibly voting states but helps rather than hurts this eternally invisible force that is our senior senator.

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton — All he needs is patience until the all-Arkansas presidential matchup of 2020.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson — With tough issues behind him, his main jobs now are to watch the unemployment rate stay low, cut income taxes, praise his wife’s redecorating in her image at the Governor’s Mansion, look over the shoulders of school kids working on computers, and go along with whatever conservative Christian monument or policy arises.

Clinton Presidential Center — I admit to having been spun into thinking that the retrenchment of the Clinton Foundation upon Hillary’s election could well result in a consolidation in, and enhanced significance of, Little Rock.

We’ll certainly have enough freeway lanes for it.

Me — Perhaps I’m too easily spun.

Bret Bielema — He must be a great coach, at least by reputation. His new edition loses its three play-makers and yardage-gainers — Brandon Allen, Alex Collins and Hunter Henry — as well as three of the five big men who did the blocking. Yet I saw a segment on the SEC Network — yes, I watched, what of it? — that projected a 9-3 record for them.

So there you have them, the arrows marking the end of summer and the start of what will surely be a wild, wild autumn.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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