We fired conventional wisdom's arrows last week in an online-only column. Perhaps treasured newsprint readers would like to behold the pundit's archery as well.
A governor's residence, a college football stadium, a public-school battle in Little Rock and the presidential choice from Hades--these and other matters cry out for an overdue firing of the fickle arrows of fate.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson--He's very political and centralizing in his governing style. Pretty much everything is run out of the second floor of the Capitol with a keen eye toward political implications.
Now suddenly his approval rating is down notably to 49 percent and his disapproval rating up notably to 24 percent. That's in a new poll from Talk Business and Hendrix College. The numbers for him were 59 and 21 in the same poll in September.
It's odd. His only two mistakes have been the dismissal of Baker Kurrus as the Little Rock school superintendent and permitting the first lady to take over the Governor's Mansion without answering to anybody.
But there's scant sympathetic statewide interest in the Little Rock schools. And any political criticism that seems grounded in Mansion decorating themes--even if the issues actually are arrogance, accountability and extravagance--risks being seen as trivial or silly.
Passing the private option is what defines and commends Hutchinson's governorship, and the poll shows public support for the program. And there is the matter of a record-low unemployment rate of 3.8 percent.
Nonetheless, the poll numbers show what the poll numbers show. Somebody has soured on Asa over something.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton--The vice presidential talk is gaining volume. He made a speech on Britain and the European Union the other day that made Donald Trump's rhetoric seem tame, so scathing was the zealous young senator's angry contempt for the idea that a country bore an obligation to cooperate with other countries.
Then, a few days later, Cotton gave an interview to Talk Business defending free-trade deals and even saying we might invite Great Britain to join NAFTA. Thus he flashed his bona fides as a so-called fusion conservative, meaning one as goofy as Trump one day and apt to be sensible the next.
Hillary Clinton--She is a woefully ungifted politician running as an experienced establishmentarian at the absolute worst time for an experienced establishmentarian. So she had one chance to win, which was that the Republicans would nominate a clown. And she got lucky.
Donald Trump--Yes, up. Anybody saying the things he's said should be at zero percent, not 40. Yet he remains positioned to repair his campaign and compete viably to impose a variation of "Brexit" in America.
I was lunching the other day with a couple of rich guys. Nice men. Friends. And they were telling me that Trump was irrational and scary.
And that they were going to vote for him.
It's because of undocumented Mexicans, extremist Muslims and Hillary--the trifecta of their disdain.
Jeff Long--He has it going his way in Fayetteville even as the basketball and baseball teams stink. It's an athletic director's job to run athletics, not correct a regional or even national misapplication of priorities.
David Pryor--From being an anti-Faubus Young Turk state legislator in the early 1960s to waging the quixotic fight the other day at age 80 against a swankier Razorback Stadium, he qualifies as the most progressive man in Arkansas public life over the last half-century.
Others--Dale Bumpers, Bill Clinton--achieved more fame. But no one else has a 50-year career bookended by fighting both segregationist machine politics and the nuclear arms race of college athletics.
Be not misled by the "aw, shucks" appearance of meekness. There's the hungry soul of a proud liberal lurking within.
Bret Bielema--I don't believe a team can lose Brandon Allen, Hunter Henry and Alex Collins without pain. But, then, I'm no Wally Hall or Bo Mattingly or Steve Sullivan or Mary Dunleavy.
Johnny Key--He's the state education commissioner who dumped the heroic success that was Kurrus. And he told the Little Rock City Board of Directors the other night that the solution to restoring minimum performance in academically distressed public schools in the Little Rock system is to transfer more resources to greater charter-school opportunities in the district.
That's like saying the way to make the Razorbacks better is for the University of Arkansas to divert resources to create a second team on campus to which the better players can transfer.
The Little Rock City Board of Directors--Scandalously, they didn't run Key out of the room and all the way back to the religious day-care center in Mountain Home that he used to operate with taxpayer money.
John Boozman--He is vulnerable as a Mitch McConnell puppet and invisible man, but not if his Democratic opponent doesn't poll better and get Democrats interested.
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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 [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/05/2016