The handy arrow format offers the most efficient way to assess in the shortest space that over-long debate of zany Republican presidential pretenders Wednesday night.
Donald Trump--He doesn't know much, but insists he will have great people around him and perform as a great president. He assures us it's going to be wonderful.
He makes odd faces and thinks childhood vaccinations are overdoses that cause autism. He reacts to criticism in a way suggesting that he struggles with a juvenile-seeming ego disorder.
Occasionally he'll embrace something refreshing in this extremist field, by which I mean moderate reason. I'm thinking of his support for higher hedge-fund taxation and his opposition to the misbegotten war in Iraq.
Surely--and I've said this inaccurately before--he will now lose a few points.
Dr. Ben Carson--He won't get those points. As a debater, he wore a nice suit.
Carly Fiorina--She'll get some of them, meaning angry anti-government outsider votes lost by Trump. She talks the way Peggy Noonan writes, meaning inaccurately and fulsomely and over-emotionally, but fluently and impressively.
There is no video of a Planned Parenthood partial-birth abortion, though she referred commandingly and with moistened eyes to one.
It was the night's best play for an Emmy.
For her closing statement she delivered a dramatic soliloquy that turned out to be a reading of the pledge of allegiance.
Jeb Bush--He was earning a solid "D" but got his mark up to a "C" with a couple of lines. One defended his brother and another suggested that his Secret Service code name should be "ever-ready," reflecting that, unlike what Trump has said about him, he is always charged up with high energy.
It turns out that Trump is right.
Jeb doesn't convey confidence or toughness, though plenty of decency. You can see why mom and dad liked him better than George W.
Chris Christie--He had a seemingly good moment rebutting the opposition to the war in Iraq expressed by Trump, Carson and Rand Paul. He spoke passionately and powerfully about the World Trade Center attack and wondering for hours if his wife, who worked nearby, was dead or alive.
The problem, though, is that George W. and Dick Cheney responded to the World Trade Center terror by attacking, in Iraq, a party having nothing to do with the World Trade Center terror.
Someone else--whose name I can't recall--nabbed Osama bin Laden. Christie hugged him once.
Marco Rubio--There will be an establishment favorite. It may be that this well-spoken, seemingly competent young man is just enough a better candidate than Jeb to emerge as that. The variable is Jeb's hundred-million dollars.
Scott Walker--Every time he showed up on screen, you were reminded that, oh, yes, he is running, too. What was his name again?
He is the guy the Koch brothers like, which tells you about the Koch brothers. He is Tom Cotton with more personality.
Ted Cruz--There are votes in this primary for a smarmy right-wing demagogue, and this guy has out-huckstered the original huckster, meaning Our Guy Mike Huckabee, for them.
Mike Huckabee--That was an interesting decision he made to skip the debate.
Say what? He was there?
Oh, yes. I remember now. He wanted to put his wife Janet's picture on the $10 bill, apparently because he couldn't think of anyone when asked for the name of the woman he would nominate for historic distinction.
He needs to step up his game if he is to achieve his goal of getting his Fox show back.
John Kasich--He makes more sense than any other candidate, such as when warning that shutting down the government over Planned Parenthood would be folly. Thus he has no chance except in New Hampshire, where they have a rare species of reasonable contemporary American Republican.
A Bush-Kasich or Rubio-Kasich ticket would probably put the Democrats out of business.
Rand Paul--His best moment came early when, for some wholly mysterious reason, Trump attacked him as unworthy of being on the stage. It probably happened because, just as Huckabee couldn't think of an admirable woman, Trump couldn't think of anything else to say about any of his other opponents.
Lindsey Graham--He appeared in the preliminary junior-varsity debate of candidates who are even less serious somehow than the aforementioned.
He'd taken a spunky pill and a whimsy tablet.
He said one thing he'd do as president is drink more. He said the time spent for the debate at the Reagan Library was the most time he'd ever spent in a library.
I suspect he will now rise from 3 percent to 3.43 percent in his home state, South Carolina, where Trump has been polling around 40.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/20/2015