Leave for another day the debate over capital punishment itself, or whether Davis deserved mercy for the brutal murder of a pregnant Jacksonville woman and her two young daughters. What remains stunningly incomprehensible to me is why, on the eve of the new millennium, Florida would want to remain one of four states that still use the electric chair when lethal injection is available.

More than a century after the electric chair was invented, Florida leads the nation in electric-chair executions. The only other states that exclusively practice electrocution are Georgia, Alabama and Nebraska. Nearly all of the other 38 states with a death penalty give prisoners at least a choice of lethal injection, with rare alternatives including the gas chamber, hanging or firing squad. Texas, where George W. Bush is now governor, led the majority of states in switching to lethal injection in 1982.

Since 1976, Florida has executed more people than any state except Texas and Virginia. Twice in the last decade, in 1990 and 1997, flames have sprouted from the heads of executed men at Florida State Prison. There have been electrical burns to heads and legs. But Davis’ execution was the first that became a bloody spectacle.

I was there because my name had come up in the reporter pool. I debated whether to take the spot because I knew I would soon be taking another assignment with my newspaper, the Palm Beach Post, that had nothing to do with death penalty reporting. Besides, it wasn’t a local case. But in the end, I told myself that as a citizen, I ought to have the guts to witness the most important act the state commits in the public’s name.

I did not sleep the night before at the Day’s Inn in Starke, an aptly named rural town in north-central Florida where the prison is one of the area’s largest employers.

Davis, 54, was so massive that he had to be rolled to the chamber in a wheelchair. To accommodate his girth, the wooden frame of the electric chair had been specially rebuilt, for the first time since inmates constructed Florida’s original chair in the 1920s. The fear was that if the chair collapsed, guards and other attendants in the execution chamber might be electrocuted by the exposed wiring.

There was a microphone for his last words, but Davis shook his head and said nothing. With his head shaved, he looked like Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz in the movie “Apocalypse Now.” Until they put the mask over his face, Davis could see us. Among the witnesses were the victim’s husband and father, who did not speak or change expression.

To the end, he would not explain why he had beaten to death Nancy Weiler and shot and killed her two young daughters, Kristina and Katherine, in their home. Was he mentally retarded, as his lawyers had claimed? Or just plain evil, a man willing to commit a heinous triple murder in what may have been a botched robbery? His parents, quiet people, lived in the same neighborhood as the victims. They had no answers either.

After the microphone was turned off, the mask was placed over his head, and with a whirring buzz, the electricity came on. I thought I knew something about what to expect. I had written about the electric chair and covered reactions to previous executions on the prison grounds. I was prepared for the chest heaves that went on minutes after what state experts said was an instantaneous death, the so-called “agonal breaths.”

But I was not prepared for Davis’ two moaning, muffled screams shortly before 2,300 volts coursed through his body. Nor was I prepared for the blood that poured down his white shirt.

Outside the chamber, dazed reporters compared details. The blood had appeared first on his chest. Had it formed a jagged circle? A cross? Eight inches across? Ten? When doctors lifted the mask briefly, we could see blood on his face. Was it from the nose or the mouth? We flipped through our notes, written with state-issued pencils on notepads provided by the Department of Corrections.

Corrections spokesmen huddled for a brief conference about what to say. Pressed, one admitted the blood was “not normal.” But the execution had been carried out properly, he said.

Later in the day, Bush said state doctors found the blood came from a nosebleed. Davis, who suffered from high blood pressure among other ailments, had been taking blood thinners, including aspirin.

The execution was a fitting end for man who had committed a horrible crime, Bush concluded. “I remain convinced that the electric chair is an appropriate way to carry out death sentences in Florida,” Bush said.

His opinion is shared by Democratic Attorney General Bob Butterworth and a majority of legislators. They cite the prevailing medical opinion that the executed person dies the instant the electricity surges through, although that is the subject of periodic debate in court.

But there is a whiff of something else in their defense of the electric chair: If the person does suffer, so be it. If the body is mutilated in some way, let that send a message to other criminals. Their victims suffered terribly. So should they.

There is a chance the court may be on the verge of retiring the chair. The last vote, in 1997, upheld the chair 4-3. The dissenting justices called the chair “a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein than the death chamber at the Florida State Prison.”

Since then, three justices have retired, including two in the pro-chair majority. There are hints newer appointees may be leaning toward lethal injection.

Still, it’s a big step to overturn nearly 80 years of established Florida practice. It’s a bigger step given that Bush and the state’s Republican legislative majority remain firm advocates of the electric chair. On Aug. 30 leaders of that majority inspected the chair and concluded it is doing its job, blood or no blood.

Observed state Rep. Victor Crist, “No one has ever walked away from it.”

I did walk away, but I will never see the electric chair the same way again.

The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race,” or someone fairly serious and “savvy,” like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.

There will be events no one could’ve predicted — like “obvious” future Republican presidential contender George Allen using an obscure racial slur on camera, or John Edwards being generally John Edwards — that destroy promising careers in an instant.

And there is also the plain fact that the sort of politicians that Washington-based reporters and pundits and political operatives like, and the sort of politicians they think “voters” would like, are often people who have no appeal for anyone outside of their districts or the Beltway. (Like Evan Bayh. Jon Huntsman. And Mitch Daniels, probably.)

Some people turn out to be awful at campaigning: Like Wesley Clark, the general who was going to sweep a troop-worshiping country off its feet and away from George W. Bush, until it turned out that he did not blink like a human. Or Rick Perry, who, it turned out, seems too dumb to dress himself when asked simple questions on television.

There are times when this sort of long-range forecasting is easy until you overthink it: John McCain was the logical 2008 front-runner the moment he addressed the 2004 Republican convention, until you started daydreaming about Fred Thompson’s seductive drawl. Al Gore was pretty obviously going to be the Democratic nominee in 2000, and boredom with his inevitability might’ve had a hand in how the political press helped destroy him that year.

A hell of a lot will obviously depend on whether or not Barack Obama wins reelection. If he loses, Democrats might suddenly find white candidates from the West or the South more attractive. If he wins, we might have to take Joe Biden semi-seriously for a few unlikely news cycles. If Obama ends a second term as popular as Clinton, someone associated with his administration is certainly more likely to be nominated than if Obama’s 2015 numbers look more like Bush’s in 2007.

So let’s get to the predictions, shall we? According to Cillizza, the “number one seed” for 2016 is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (Mark Warner is still on the shortlist, by the way. His time will come!)

Cuomo is the reasonably popular governor of a very populous state. He’s thus far managed to balance liberal base-pleasing deeds (gay marriage!) with “moderate” newspaper editorial-board pleasing things (going after the pensions of public employees!). But we’re still talking about a Northeast liberal (or “liberal”) — from New York! — who’s living with but not currently married to a celebrity television cook who makes awful-looking garbage food out of prepackaged garbage food. The Democratic Party might not want to chance another blatantly culturally urban candidate. (I mean urban in the literal sense, and not as weird racial code.) Plus he’s in the honeymoon portion of his governorship, and that job has utterly destroyed its last two holders.

Plus, Cuomo looks like he’s on pace to use up much of the goodwill he built up with liberals after signing gay marriage into law. (So far there’s been his apparent lack of interest in transit, signing awful gerrymandered legislative and congressional district lines, and his property tax cap.)

Joe Biden has run for president twice and never come remotely close to winning a single primary. He’ll be 74 in 2016. As Steve Kornacki already pointed out, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to nominate 70-somethings. He’s also a gaffe-prone goofball whose appeal is that he’s a ridiculous character. I would not put a lot of InTrade money on Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Hillary Clinton is a bit younger than Biden, and a lot more serious than Biden. But does she still want to be president? Who knows. (Anyone who says they know is lying.) And if she runs in 2016, does she hire the same asinine campaign team that lost her the nomination in 2008?

After those three, we’re already essentially in “who?” territory with the Democrats. Not to say that someone no one has heard of now won’t be the nominee — with Democrats, you may be more likely to get a relative unknown than with Republicans — but we can’t know which governors or senators will turn out to be Barack Obama (or even John Edwards) and which ones will turn out to be… well, Mark Warner.

And theoretically there would be more women vying for the nomination than just Hillary Clinton. Cillizza posits New York Sen. Kristen Gillibrand — a long shot, in my estimation — and senatorial hopeful Elizabeth Warren, who, if she loses her election, would surely be out of the running, and if she wins, would be … a liberal senator from Massachusetts. So, I dunno, Amy Klobuchar? Sadly, four of the current six female governors are Republicans. The two Democrats are North Carolina’s Bev Purdue, who is currently polling poorly enough that she’s announced that she won’t seek reelection, and Washington’s Christine Gregoire, who seems cool, so let’s just put her on the fantasy shortlist. (Oh, I guess the Times already did.)

But you see where we are, at this point: Randomly tossing out names. It’s like predicting the 2016 NFL Draft. Some of these kids are still in high school!

As for Republicans: If Mitt Romney wins the election, there’s the candidate, fun speculation time done. (Unless Newt and Ron Paul mount a primary challenge?!?) If he loses, the party likely learns the lesson it always learns and lurches to the right for a while, and your front-runner in that case (assuming he doesn’t blow up the party at the convention, I guess?) is Rick Santorum. I made this point already and Dave Weigel concurred. He’s a “true conservative” and he looks like he’ll “come in second” this year, which are both substantial advantages in the Republican race.

Maybe it’s Marco Rubio if Romney makes him the running mate, but the GOP does not often nominate losing running mates, because why would you?

Is Paul Ryan, who frantically introduces numbers-laden fake-serious budgets every year, the future of the party? I happen to think he’s basically a bland weenie who only excites people predisposed to thrill to rich-on-poor economic warefare, but a not insubstantial portion of the Republican Party “elite” seems to like that sort of thing. Mitch Daniels is somehow even less electrifying, but as a governor he has a better shot than Rep. Ryan. And Santorum still seems to have a massive advantage over them all.

(Oh, what about Chris Christie? Yes, well, he’d certainly be fun but he is pretty moderate for the national Republican Party, even if he masks it by being an obnoxious, belligerent bully. And he is woefully unprepared to protect us from CREEPING SHARIAH.)

One guy changes this calculus, obviously: Jeb Bush, because the Bush name exerts some sort of weird hypnotic power over the Republican Party, and they are often forced to do their bidding, even when, afterward, they all regret it. I like to imagine that the nation as a whole has decided that it’s done with Bushes forever, but that is pretty naive. I mean, Nixon got elected twice. Jeb Bush has not actually held office in a while — by 2016 he’ll have been a regular private citizen for nearly a decade — and it’s possible the family has decided to wait for George P. Bush to come of age before reasserting their claim over the White House (oh man, guys, he just turned 35).

The sick need to treat politics like it’s fantasy baseball ensures that there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to make people not wildly speculate as to what will happen years after an election that is still months away, so I just encourage you to be sensible and responsible about it. (Like, it won’t be Rand Paul.)

Here is the very belated and perfunctory endorsement statement:

Congratulations to Governor Mitt Romney on his win last night and to all the candidates for a hard fought, thoughtful debate and primary season.

Primary elections have been held in 34 states, and now is the time for Republicans to unite behind Governor Romney and take our message of fiscal conservatism and job creation to all voters this fall.

I am endorsing Mitt Romney for our party’s nomination. We face huge challenges, and we need a leader who understands the economy, recognizes more government regulation is not the answer, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism and works to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to succeed.

Now is the time to just give up on finding a good properly conservative candidate who is also electable and acceptable to the Republican Party’s rich donor base and make the best of this Romney thing.

Romney celebrated the endorsement by having a major campaign aide say something unbelievably stupid on television.

(Oh, fun fact from Dave Weigel: Guess who signed Florida’s insane “stand your ground” legislation into law?)

Washington insiders are not thrilled with this gang:

Another, more subtle indicator of the congressional GOP’s heartburn over the looming presidential campaign can be detected in the quips about some of the prospective candidates who are soaking up media attention.

“Well, I thought everybody had rallied around [Rep.] Michele Bachmann — that was my sense,” deadpanned [Rep. David] Dreier when asked about where his fellow House Republicans stand on the presidential race.

Ha. Zing? That’s going to make for an awkward chat in the cloakroom.

These establishment Republicans would like, say, David Petraeus to run. Unfortunately, he keeps saying he won’t. But the guy fights wars and wears a uniform, which makes him automatically super-qualified to be president in the imaginations of various doughy old Republicans, much like Colin Powell was, long ago.

If the general won’t run (and he won’t) these gentlemen would also settle for Chris Christie, the YouTube viral video star, or maybe Jeb Bush, who is a Bush. Or Mitch Daniels!

Not mentioned by these insiders: Christie is just as gimmicky and grating as Trump. Jeb Bush isn’t going to waste his run on a fight against an incumbent. And Mitch Daniels is, secretly, no more exciting than Tim Pawlenty.

Mitt Romney is as good as it’s going to get for the GOP this cycle, and the sooner they get over themselves and embrace him the better off they’ll be. Or keep complaining, I’m fine either way.

Fun fact: Rove, who divorced his wife of 24 years in 2009, is now openly dating lobbyist Karen Johnson. Johnson sat on Bush’s Business Council when he was governor of Texas, and worked for his transition team in 2000, which helped her lobbying business immensely. Rove and Johnson have been rumored to be having an affair for years. The former incarnation of Radar Magazine reported the rumor in 2005. In 2008 Radar claimed that Johnson’s family was urging her to leave Rove and settle down with a ranch foreman named (no joke) Rhett Hard. Looks like that is no longer necessary.

Johnson’s business partner is of course Katharine Armstrong, the owner of the ranch where Dick Cheney shot Harry Whittington in the face. (This ranch is also where Rove spends a lot of time hanging out with wealthy GOP donors.)

Ok, so, what else do we learn about Rove? He still thinks he’s secretly a policy wonk, he nearly went broke during his legal troubles and divorce, he got his Fox job by just calling up his good friend Roger Ailes and saying he needed cash (“a Fox spokesperson says that Ailes doesn’t recall that version of events”), and Fox pays him much less than they pay Palin. He claims there is no such thing as the “Republican establishment” that meets in backrooms to plot out the future of the party and anoint candidates, but also this happened:

Last spring, Rove was ready to don the crown. He gathered the old tribes together and effectively anointed himself their leader, holding a breakfast at his house in D.C. with eighteen leaders of rival pacs, including former Nixon and Bush 41 confidant and GOP fund-raiser Fred Malek, of American Action Network, and Mary Cheney, Dick’s daughter, representing the Partnership for America’s Future. The anxious group was packed into Rove’s cramped living room, his two massive, ceiling-high shelves of history books looming over them.

Rove also mocks Sarah Palin and wishes that Jeb Bush would run for president. Rove is not scared of Palin — or of Rush Limbaugh — which looks like political bravery but is really just the knowledge that the base that the rest of the GOP is in thrall to is actually a relatively small demographic segment of the electorate. And his Crossroads money-raising machine will probably have a significant role in deciding who gets the 2012 GOP nomination, even though Rove doesn’t particularly like any of the candidates involved.

(The profile is illustrated with a photo of Rove taken by artist Andres Serrano, known among non-art aficionados primarily for his 1987 piece “Piss Christ.” I assume this is New York having a bit of fun.)

(K-Lo thinks Jeb Bush would make a fine running mate. Wouldn’t he look so nice up onstage with, say, Rick Santorum? Swoon!)

Jeb says he won’t run in 2012. If there is a point to all this Jeb Bush ego-stroking, it’s that the GOP establishment has probably decided that Jeb will be the post-Obama nominee, and they’re getting everyone acclimated to the idea. And maybe some of them would like Jeb to make a practice run for the job, like Reagan did in 1976. (Said practice run was not necessary for Jeb’s brother George, but I guess they’d like to make the process look more legitimate this time around.)

So here is Rich Lowry, with a more serious column, explaining why Jeb must run now. There are eight simple reasons, but they boil down to the fact that no one credible is running this year and by 2016 there will be more serious candidates (Christie! Rubio!) and Jeb Bush will have been out of office for 10 years. The unspoken argument is that Jeb needs to establish himself as nominee material this cycle, if he wants the crown next time.

Will it happen? I dunno, but the idea isn’t completely laughable. The sad fact is that the Bush name is not the handicap that you’d think it would be, because American popular memory lasts about 10 seconds now (aided by a press that strongly prefers to move on to the next thing), and there was never really a full national accounting of just how incompetent and criminal the previous administration was.

Those first debates are right around the corner, Jeb!