NYT: There are the real lists, bluff lists and lists of politicians who make a big show of saying they don’t want to be on the list even though they never were or would have been. Entire ballrooms in Denver and St. Paul could be filled with people who will claim to have been on Mr. Obama’s and Mr. McCain’s short lists.
“There’s a short list for show, and then there’s the actual short list,” said Chuck Todd, the NBC News political director. And the “short list for show” can actually become quite long. It could include names that the campaign releases as plums to key supporters, whether or not said key supporters are actually being considered as running mates.
Here's my speculation: Joe Biden is out. Jim Webb is out. Mark Warner is out. They've all said they're not interested and seemed to mean it.
Meanwhile, Frank Rich says we've all forgotten the war. Sadly, people are still getting killed but we've tuned out, largely because we want out.
Expect more war mongering from John McCain, though:
NYT: One neocon pundit, Charles Krauthammer, summed up this alternative-reality mind-set in a recent column piously commanding Mr. McCain to “make the election about Iraq” because “everything is changed,” and “we are winning on every front.” The war, he wrote, can be “the central winning plank of his campaign.” (Italics his.)
This hyperventilating wasn’t necessary, because this is what Mr. McCain is already trying to do. His first general election ad, boosted by a large media buy in swing states this month, was all about war. It invoked his Vietnam heroism and tried to have it both ways on Iraq by at once presenting Mr. McCain as a stay-the-course warrior and taking a (timid) swipe at President Bush. “Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war,” Mr. McCain said in his voice-over. That unnamed fool would be our cowboy president, who in March told American troops how he envied their “in some ways romantic” task of “confronting danger.”
Really, does anyone think we're "winning" the war. We don't even know what that means. But we can't discount McCain's fear mongering. Bush proved that it works.
