Let me be clear from the jump that I’m not a Hillary Clinton fan. She is too loose with the facts, is unable to speak extemporaneously, being most comfortable with focus group-tested messages, lost in 2008 because she was so unsure of her self that she ran a way too traditional man’s campaign, and a lousy one at that, and then there’s my own personal peeve: She has never adequately come to terms publicly with her husband’s serial indiscretions. Having said all that, I’ll vote for her next year and have no doubt that she will crush her Republican opposition.

That opposition — at this point a dozen or so wannabes and counting (but then who’s counting?) — is as piss-poor an excuse for a slate of prospective nominees that I can recall. Since 2012. Has the Republican Party learned nothing since that crushing defeat amidst so-so economic news and widespread antipathy toward Barack Obama and his new health-care law? Absolutely not. And now even the Citizens United decision the GOP so slavishly supported is biting the party on it’s capacious posterior since it enables anyone with a Magic Marker and some poster board to raise tons of cash. Who needs Kickstarter?

Aside from the quality of that opposition, there is the fact that most of the wannabes are more interested in dissing Hillary — and by extension Bubba — than explaining why they are deserving of the Oval Office. This is because the economy is doing rather well, thank you, and Obamacare is no longer a handy whipping boy because, by golly, it is working rather well, as well, even if the president still is a foreign-born Islamofascist. A conspicuous exception to the Hillary bashers is Ted Cruz, who has his undies in a knot over what he claims is a Pentagon plot to invade and declare martial law in Texas.

I happen to think that Mike Huckabee is the GOP’s best chance to give Hillary a run for her money who isn’t named Bush, but he too didn’t fail to disappoint this week in announcing his candidacy in Hope, Arkansas, less because that was his birthplace than because it was Bubba’s. Inconveniently, Hillary was born in Chicago, but you get the point.

Adding to the Republicans’ woes is that despite Benghazi, secret emails and dodgy donations to a Clinton family foundation, a whole lot of voters like Hillary, and according to an authoritative new poll, more people see her as a strong leader than they did earlier this year despite weeks of scrutiny about her ethics that have spit cups overflowing at Fox News. Worse yet, nine in 10 Democrats say the U.S. is ready to elect a woman president. This presumably does not include Republican wannabe Carly Fiorina, who of course cannot campaign on her record as a high-tech company wrecker and job out-sourcer and has had to fall back on . . . Hillary bashing. Fiorina’s biggest asset at this point is that most likely Republican primary voters don’t even know who she is. Such a pity that Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have decided that baking cookies is preferable to saving the republic.

This is the point in the movie where we note that polls are only a snapshot in time and the election is, after all, 18 months away. But given the surfeit of Republican chuckleheads, it’s not merely difficult to see how Hillary Clinton will have to concede the inside track. It’s impossible.