Race to the Trough as political stupidity

So I guess something like 40 states put in the effort to send in their troughside applications in round 1.  And you just know it was a big pain in the butt for them, and hopes are riding high.  So here's how it's gonna turn out:

As with most things in nature, the quality of the applications (according to whatever criteria DOE comes up with) is going to be distributed along a bell curve.  There's going to one really outstanding, a few pretty good, a whole bunch of so-so, and some real stinkers.  And they're all going to have to be graded, and Arne Duncan is going to have to set  a cut score.

What a miserable job.  

Of course, he repeatedly said that there are going to losers, but nobody who went to all the trouble to complete the application was sitting around thinking, "Geez, I bet I'm a loser."  So Arne had 3 choices.  He sets the cut score really high and awards grants to the indisputably superior applications, but then he makes lots of enemies, lots of disgruntled governors phoning in and whining and complaining about how in these cash-strapped times Duncan made overworked state ed depts waste their time.  That would probably be a bad move.

Or he sets the bar somewhere in the middle, in which case you'd be hard-pressed to find a hair's-breadth difference between some of the winning applications and some of the losing ones.  Then Duncan wouldn't make a lot of enemies, but the few he made would be extremely vocal and annoyed.  It will be like trying to explain to Mr & Mrs Smith why you gave Johnny at 89 on his history paper instead of the 90 he needed to get into the gifted program.  "You've gotta be kidding me!  You're telling me he lost by a misplaced comma?!?  But you said yourself he was a wonderful writer!"

Or Dunc is going to do what he has repeatedly said he won't do and make almost everybody happy by giving them a little taste.

Given Obama's current political fortunes, I'm betting on option 3.