Mushy centrism is better than weird centrism. And regular centrism is not as simple in Alaska as it used to be.
Through all that, things seem to be working out for Ketanji Brown Jackson. She almost assuredly will be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
No reason other than partisan Republican pandering exists to vote against her installation as the first Black female justice.
She's smart and qualified. She endured with fatigued grace the gantlet of nonsense erected by Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn and Lindsey Graham.
The mushy centrist referred to above is Susan Collins, Republican senator from Maine. The weird centrist is Kyrsten Sinema, Democratic senator from Arizona.
The regular centrist with complications in Alaska is Republican Lisa Murkowski.
Taking them in that order in the context of Jackson's confirmation:
Collins famously casts herself as an earnest centrist seeking to work with the other side. It's a political necessity afforded by Maine's independent streak. The state's other senator, Angus King, is an actual independent who caucuses with Democrats.
But critics often complain that Collins talks a better bipartisan game than she votes. There was, for example, the time she voted to acquit Donald Trump on his impeachment for urging Ukraine's now-famous president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to start an investigation in his country of Joe Biden.
Collins said the call was plainly improper but that Trump had learned his lesson.
It turned out that all Trump appeared to have learned was that insurrection would be nice.
But, on Wednesday, Collins gave a direct commitment that she would vote to confirm Jackson to the Supreme Court. At that point she was the first and still-only Republican senator to do so, and her commitment seemed to assure confirmation. It produced the 50th vote, enabling Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie.
That brings us to the weird Sinema, the 50th Democratic vote who has yet to oppose a Biden judgeship nomination. But, at the time of Collins' announcement, the enigmatic senator was still saying she declined as a matter of policy to reveal her votes in advance.
Press reports were that Biden was increasingly frustrated with Sinema, who wouldn't return his calls.
I've tried hard to defend Sinema because she values bipartisanship and took one of the leads on the infrastructure collaboration. But her game of inviting focus on the pivotal mystery of herself gets tiresome. There is very little about Jackson that Sinema would yet need to know to announce her support.
No matter. Biden and Jackson no longer seem to need her weirdness. And they may get a small GOP cushion.
And that brings us to the complications for the Alaskan centrist, Murkowski.
She was another leader in the infrastructure collaboration. She voted for Trump's conviction. She reveals actual bipartisanship a tad more frequently than Collins.
But she had not announced her position on Jackson by late week, perhaps because of the ironic calculus emerging in her re-election situation this year.
She narrowly lost the Republican senatorial nomination in Alaska to a hard-right opponent 12 years ago. But then she went out and won the race as a write-in, attracting votes from the center in a three-candidate battle.
Thus, she seems a centrist perfectly suited in her bid for re-election this year for Alaska's new system of open primaries and ranked general-election voting, which is designed to devalue divisive base appeal in primaries and elevate broader options in general elections.
First the state will have an all-comers primary. Then the top four finishers will proceed to a ranked-voting system in the general election. In ranked voting, you get credit for being a second choice or third choice--if no one gets a straight majority from direct first-place votes.
But there is the complication.
The possible problem for Murkowski--and no one seems to have a good handle on whether it really is a problem--is that the only Democrat in that race dropped out. That means, most likely, that the general election race will unfold with the Trump- endorsed Republican, Kelly Tshibaka, running against Murkowski by casting her as the Democratic option, effectively.
Head to head, Republicans beat Democrats statewide in Alaska. Murkowski ideally needs a fuzzier set of options than what may be emerging.
The point is that, with her vote on Jackson not vital, Murkowski is trying to figure out her best political play. Will she do the popular bipartisan thing or will that risk looking too Democratic? Or, if she is to be the default Democrat, mightn't it help her to act in this case like a Democrat?
Ranked voting was supposed to elevate a nonpartisan like Murkowski and liberate the moderate and bipartisan course.
But nothing seems to quite work out as planned in American politics these days, except that Jackson is apparently headed to the court.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.