With the Iowa caucuses less than a year away, political journalists find themselves in a blind panic because all of 2012's would-be presidential candidates are thus far refraining from formally jumping into the race, opting instead to "staff up in Iowa/New Hampshire" and "raise money" and "continue to mull their options." As every single media outlet dedicated to politics reported last week, at this time in the last presidential election cycle, everyone had 19 or so shiny candidates to profile and beat-sweeten. That the same thing isn't happening right now is devastating, and quite possibly a war crime.
And look what we've become: now, people are starting to speculate who the 2012 GOP vice-presidential candidates might be! As Politico reports, the "GOP loves look of VP field," ending any speculation that GOP officials had evaluated the potential vice-presidential candidates and concluded, "You know, this is really a hot sack of vomit."
It's almost as though there is more excitement over the deep pool of vice presidential prospects than over the emerging roster of presidential candidates, which is largely composed of white, male, former and soon-to-be-former governors, none of them from the biggest battleground states.
On the vice presidential level, Republicans already are gushing over the sheer diversity of the candidates--unprecedented in terms of race, gender, geography and political experience -- who could fill out the 2012 ticket.
Words like "almost as though" and "gushing" are doing a lot of very imaginative, heavy lifting in this piece. Here's what it amounts to:
"Whoever the presidential nominee is, I think he's going to have a huge VP list out there that he'll be able to choose from."
That's from former Mike Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman, using his wild imagination to conjure up this fantastic potential "list" of names from which the heretofore unknown candidate for president might choose a running mate, an unprecedented thing in American politics.
Elsewhere, Tim Pawlenty says that there will "be no shortage of great talent" on that list, a list he'll probably want to be on if he doesn't win the nomination.
The rest of the piece essentially amounts to hurriedly naming all of the Republicans who managed to obtain a high-to-medium public profile during the 2010 campaign season. High in the piece comes praise for Marco Rubio, for instance. And while I understand that President Barack Obama "broke the mold" in terms of cutting his first Senate term short to run for the White House, Rubio has only been a senator for a few weeks now. I sort of think people should just leave Marco Rubio alone, and he, evidently, agrees with me.
In other news, I am really looking forward to Christmas 2013. I think it's going to be a festive season of decorated trees and lights, and I think there's a good chance I'll get one or two really neat presents.
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