The arrows land

Mike Huckabee winds up in a four- way tie for first in the Republican presidential race in a new poll.

Hillary Clinton persists as the likely Democratic nominee.

Asa Hutchinson is busy establishing clear and unconvincing priorities.

So it’s high time we fired arrows reflecting conventional wisdom’s fickle fate.

Mike Huckabee— When you’re running for president for fun and to enhance your Falwellian brand for long- range media marketing purposes, showing up tied for the lead for your party’s nomination is a complication. The problem is that he wants to appeal to a niche, and the Republican field is so crowded and so weak that his niche threatens to lift him into actual contention for a real responsibility he does not want and for which he is wholly ill- suited.

Let’s say he’s first or second in a dissipated Iowa vote, then first or second in South Carolina, then first in the big SEC primary. Suddenly he’s in the lead and the panic is everywhere— in the Republican Party, in the public and, most of all, in Huckabee.

Tom Cotton— Yes, up. He’s the lone major Republican officeholder in Arkansas not engaging in the convenience of going through the motion of endorsing the Huckabee presidential poppycock. That he does it for the worst of reasons— because he’s a tool of the kook- right Club for Growth that finds Huckabee a liberal— is, for today’s firing of arrows, at least, beside the point.

Hillary Clinton— Yes, it is quite true that she is yesterday’s news and a vulnerable candidate owing to a weariness with retreads and a pervasive distrust of her based on the fact that seeming genuineness in the public arena ever evades her. But her money, organization, resumé, inevitability and historic representation of women could be countered effectively only by a talent resembling the force that was Barack Obama in 2008. And that does not exist, and is not likely to emerge.

Asa Hutchinson— The sugary moderate sauce he puts on his right- wing pudding is dissolving. He has established clear priorities: He’s lowered taxes for the middle class and well- to- do, reduced spending for community health clinics and rural libraries, and mortgaged the state treasury to send millions— 87 of them— to a massively rich defense contractor. He’s Brownback Lite.

And the heck of it is that his governorship hasn’t actually begun yet. He is still in the preseason. His governorship will begin when he decides what to do with, or to, the private- option form of Medicaid expansion. And it then hinges not only on what he decides, but whether he can get enacted whatever he decides.

He needs to be for the private option and against the Obamacare that funds it. It is hard to say, “I deplore this money from the federal government. But we need this money from the federal government.” But he must say it.

The Duggars— They got out there all Huckabee- esque with a TV show and profitable celebrity, advancing a narrative of a family oddly humongous but ever wholesome. And that narrative had one flaw both small— in that one bad apple in 19 isn’t bad— and mammoth, in that the bad apple was seriously bad, affecting other apples, and not properly tended to, even, in a way, covered up. So they’ll try to talk their way out of it tonight on Fox, where all down- arrowed conservatives go for rehabilitation.

Arkansas voters— They cannot get right the office of state treasurer. First Martha Shoffner and now Dennis Milligan, who got bogged down in a pile of petty messes of blunder and incompetence even more quickly than I expected.

Dennis Milligan— Just to complete the immediately preceding item.

Bruce Westerman— Yes, up. Sometimes you have to step back and applaud a guy for being straightup. And Westerman’s frightful and horrendously offensive notion essentially to cut federal funding for medical services to poor people and divert the money to highways is straight- up.

By straight- up, I mean his position reflects honest modern conservatism without any of Asa’s sugary sauce. Essentially he is saying we need to stop helping needy people so much and start improving the roads for those of us who use them.

It’s not let them eat cake. It’s let them drive.