Looking at the pack, I wonder how many voters can even say something about each of the names on the full slate. Even in simply determining each candidate’s state, as a starter, or the major offices he or she’s held.

That’s even before the question of finding some significant way one stands out from the rest.

I’m even asking if they’d make a decent Cabinet, put together.

Here’s hoping things start to get lively. Let us see who they are. Really are.

So we can keep asking:

How soon before the Trump card turns into a Joker?

Or before the Apprentice tag takes hold?

Or before the whole deck’s cleared?

A surgeon is more of an artist than an administrator.

There’s nothing to make me think he can lead a management team, much less a host of competing political and economic interests. Artists, after all, tend to act as soloists or move in small circles. An operating room remains a small stage or studio, all focused on one event, unlike the chaotic forces erupted in the Oval Office.

Before aspiring to the White House, could he show us how he’d function as a big city mayor? Or a small-state governor? Or even as a senator or congressman?

Let’s put this in context. An operating room is much, much smaller than the Pentagon. And the Pentagon’s only part of the Executive Branch.

Ben Carson’s not ready for prime time here. Not by a long shot. No matter how much we might like him.

By the way, his is the first — and the only — GOP bumper sticker we’ve seen on a New Hampshire car to date. This is turning into a first-in-the-nation presidential primary quite unlike any we’ve encountered before.

The thought hit me the other morning: The Donald’s the new Palin!

Doncha know? Just listen and compare. See how they move.

And then ask: Hasn’t he gone rogue? Or pure maverick?

Could they even work as a team?

And to think, it would counter the sexism label he’s attached to himself.

When the Donald brags about being a successful executive, a little context helps. He heads a private company, without any real risk of board intrigue or challenge, and is valued, by independent observers, at $3 billion to $4 billion. We won’t even get into his near bankruptcies.

In contrast, Carly Fiorina headed an $57 billion company that was No. 35 on the Forbes most valued brands list. A company with $109 billion in sales and 302,000 employees. Oh, yes, one that weighed in at No. 19 on the Fortune 500 list.

Want to talk about management insight, then? Especially in a truly competitive world.

He’s got a last name for his first, and a first name for his last.

Any surprise if he has his politics backward?

For as long as I can remember, the Republican Party has had two wings that fit uneasily together – one essentially ideological, claiming a conservative label; the other, more pragmatic, meaning liberal. Think Taft versus Eisenhower. Even so, this was still the party of Lincoln, one way or the other.

And then, when the Southern Strategy landed Nixon in the White House, everything shifted. In the ensuing tilt, few pragmatists are left, and none of them would claim a liberal streak.

What now exists is an uneasy alliance of a core of the rich Wall Street contributors and the Tea Party-related corps of voters whose numbers have kept the GOP in office. (Yes, I know the Wall Street label isn’t quite accurate either, knowing how many of the biggest contributors live in Texas.) As the insightful book What’s Wrong With Kansas wonders, this has often meant electing officials whose policies and beliefs hurt the constituents’ own best interests. It’s been big money, in the end, over middle-class working families and voters.

What’s interesting at the moment is the way Donald Trump has taken control of the presidential primary away from the Wall Street establishment and is playing directly to the street-level party members. In the September 24 New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky denotes two elements the party has been relying on – cultural and racial resentment, combined with spectacle – “the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style over ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged …” Or, as he says, “There is a strong tendency, perfected over the years by Fox News, to cover and discuss domestic politics as a combination of war, sport, and entertainment all at once.”

Voila! We have the Donald, who hails from a rival television network – something that has to add to the fury Fox is feeling. (Well, he has turned some of that back on Fox News itself in refusing to be interviewed … which leads to a whole other discussion.)

I’ve long wondered what it would take to split the Republican Party the way, say, abortion rights have weakened the Democrats. Maybe it won’t come down to a particular issue so much as a feeling of betrayal when it comes to a livable income for average American households – which now require two wage-earners, rather than just one as it did when I was growing up. The focus of the war-and-sport outlook just might turn in entertaining ways nobody would have predicted six months ago. Maybe we’ll actually get serious in the aftermath and consider solutions to some very real problems.

Or maybe a long simmering realignment might happen for the parties themselves.