However, most of the blame rests on the candidate herself, who skittishly avoided the free exposure of national talk shows where she could have honed her debating skills. As many commentators have observed, running for president without a trial campaign for lower office is probably too much of a stretch. Dole seemed clueless about the sheer range of concrete issues needed to prove a candidate’s viability for the presidency. And her lack of all-pro handlers was quaintly naive. While the once painfully dowdy Hillary Clinton has had a top-to-toe makeover by her Hollywood chums (with pantsuits now concealing her figure flaws), Dole scarcely budged from her early-1980s Joan Collins-as-Alexis Carrington look, which signaled in its own way how culturally sheltered and frozen Dole was.

If the glass ceiling is ever to be broken in politics, it’s women themselves who must rethink their sexual personae. The first woman president will need to avoid Elizabeth Dole’s fatiguing sorority-girl chirpiness and seek a more convincing authority of manner — which is already possessed by both Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Feinstein impressed me anew last week with her performance on CNN’s “Crossfire.” “She should be president,” exclaimed my partner Alison as we watched. “She’s rational and smart, and she seems stable and trustworthy,” Alison said. “She has true self-confidence without egotism. She’s not a flibbertigibbet; she’s not obsessed with herself.”

Whatever reservations some California residents of both parties may have about Feinstein, please note that I have been studying her for years as a national candidate, a seasoned politician with foreign relations expertise who could represent this nation to the world. As a senator and former mayor, Dianne Feinstein, unlike Elizabeth Dole, has long experience with the harsh give-and-take of the day-to-day political process, that dusty bull pit of butting, shoving and goring where both winners and losers must come up smiling.

Feinstein is tough yet cordial and even-tempered. She projects hard-nosed realism yet compassion and concern. And she sure can parry and thrust with the hectoring media, who never throw her off message. Dianne Feinstein is in my view the leading contender for next year’s Democratic vice-presidential nomination. She is manifestly well prepared to assume the presidency in a crisis.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, continues galumphing down her celebrity-studded, taxpayer-gouging primrose path. Coldly calculating, hedging, ethically obtuse and strident on the stump, Hillary does a great job of snowing phony humanitarians like the mama-seeking talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell (who organized this week’s frivolous Broadway birthday bash for the first lady). But unlike Elizabeth Dole, who was Secretary of Transportation and president of the American Red Cross, Hillary has never successfully run anything in her life — not even her dysfunctional family in their decades-long squat in government housing.

Salon reader Fred Dimond calls Hillary a “male chauvinist” because she is married to “a serial adulterer who constantly does her dirt” and because she “not only takes it but covers it up”:

While Hillary masquerades as a defender of women’s rights and upholder of oppressed females, she has been part of the group protecting and defending Bill from the just repercussions of his ruthless predatory behavior toward the opposite sex. In fact, we had a very credible rape allegation on television. No comment from Saint Hillary. No comment on Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Kathryn Gracen and a boatload more. She would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know of these situations, or pusillanimous not to react to them. Why doesn’t she? Because Bill is her ticket to ride, and she cannot afford to get off the horse. She is willing to cooperate in Bill’s subversion of women’s rights for political gain and power.

Dimond calls Hillary’s behavior “hypocritical” and “outrageous”, and I thoroughly agree. In my interview with radio host Rush Limbaugh in the October issue of the Limbaugh Letter, I further explore Hillary’s history of questionable behavior — such as her perversion of her assigned role on the platform at her Wellesley College commencement to embarrass an eminent African-American guest, Republican Sen. Edward Brooke. (In this piece I also hail Rush Limbaugh’s “tremendous intellectual influence” on the American mass audience — which our snobbish fossil leftists, who pretend to speak for the people, of course know nothing about.)

Many thanks to Dr. Richard Tracey of Carlsbad, Calif., who sends a fascinating letter responding to my description of Pat Buchanan as “Irish Catholic” (vis-a-vis the Brooklyn Museum of Art controversy). The Buchanans on their paternal side are actually Scotch-Irish and Presbyterian, “descended from the Scots who benefited from James I’s ‘plantation’ of Ireland with his own countrymen — who displaced the native Irish whose patrimony Pat claims.” Tracey continues:

It was Pat’s mother (of German-Catholic descent, as I recall) who brought Catholicism to the offspring of her marriage to a Presbyterian man whose inherited family values would likely have been pro-English, anti-Irish. Thus Pat isn’t an Irish Catholic, or Irish-American Catholic, as we generally understand those terms. His Irishness is pure Orange. Yet he has cloaked himself in the Green for the political effect of being seen to share Ted Kennedy’s ancestry while standing against all aspects of the Massachusetts senator’s social program. As a supreme rhetorician, Pat too much enjoys the taste of those ironies to claim publicly his descent from the likes of Ian Paisley.

Buchanan’s announcement this week of his resignation from the Republican Party to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party will inject welcome drama into next year’s national campaign, but his bitter attack on his own party is disturbing. Strong, independent voices of criticism and rebuke are desperately needed in this country, but Buchanan has shown little interest in the humdrum details of practical political work. He seems to have only one goal — shooting to the top of the line like a late Roman Caesar. Buchanan appears less qualified for high office than the quirkily long-shot Donald Trump, an articulate, shrewdly observant, high-powered businessman and real estate developer with a genuine common touch.

More on ethnicity: Salon reader Maggie Balistreri, who grew up in Bensonhurst, writes to protest the stereotyping of Italians in the media: “Italians are portrayed by all as either buffoons (Benigni has a lot to answer for) or mobsters (DeNiro is blending the two roles nicely lately). So what happened to the image of the Italian? It used to be the utterly refined dandy, the aesthete. Now it’s the grunting buffoon.”

I applaud this indictment. It dovetails with a letter from Frank Francomano, who remarks, “I have long wondered why my ethnic group remains open to unpunished calumny, especially from supposedly sensitive and politically correct and often Jewish left and far left people.”

Responding to a query last month about “The Sopranos” from TV critic Michele Greppi for Fashion Wire Daily, I denounced that over-praised HBO series about yet another Italian-American Mafia family as “a buffoonish caricature of my people” and “an ethnic minstrel show — Amos and Andy for a TV industry that can no longer get away with demeaning stereotypes of blacks and Jews.” Francis Ford Coppola’s first two “Godfather” films are masterpieces that I adore, but there has been no creative progress in over 20 years. I told Greppi, “I’m sick and tired of Italian-Americans being used as monotonously one-note lowbrow fantasy figures by an entertainment industry too lazy and klutzy to get us right.”

“‘The Sopranos’ is ethnic defamation,” Dominic Amorosa of the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations told the New York Daily News this fall. “Our goal is to get ‘The Sopranos’ off the air,” said Frank Guarini, chairman of the National Italian-American Foundation. As a free speech advocate, I wouldn’t go that far, but high-decibel consciousness-raising about this issue is urgently needed.

Two weeks ago, amid much furor, the French Parliament granted legal status to cohabiting unmarried couples, a development I welcome not just for its contribution to gay rights but for its incremental movement along the path toward my ultimate libertarian goal: the total disconnection of civil authority from the realm of consensual personal relationships, heterosexual or homosexual, which the secular state should neither sanction nor monitor. The modern economic liberation of women heralded the end of state paternalism and intrusion into private life, but the latter process remains incomplete.

On the home front, the trial of the second man charged with last year’s murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming has been treated with blatant manipulation of the news by the liberal major media. As I wrote in my column immediately after that tragedy, the issue of exciting but dangerous gay-male cruising for stranger sex cannot be avoided in this case. But despite even the public warning by Shepard’s mother that “Matt was not a saint,” a censored and sanitized version of the fatal evening is being promulgated by newscasters in lockstep with gay activist groups.

It’s now a simplistic melodrama of virtue versus villainy, as if Shepard — who had a history of two known incidents that ended violently and who had just the prior week confessed to a fear of being killed — had been ambushed and kidnapped from the bar because he was gay. Human nature is complex: Shepard, who had traveled abroad, was drawn to his assailants, I suspect, precisely because they were scuzzy punks whose look and manner fairly screamed trouble.

What happened to Matthew Shepard was brutal and barbaric, and as a supporter of capital punishment, I want his killers to fry. (One has already been sentenced to two consecutive life terms.) Both Alison and I have long been in favor of bringing torture back, which I argue would not fall under the rubric of “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment if it were a strict replication of the suffering that had been inflicted on the victim — heinous in this muddled, boozy case but even more atrocious in cold-blooded, precisely planned serial rape-murders of the Ted Bundy kind.

But it does not help the cause of gay rights to pump the public discourse full of intelligence-insulting schmaltz over exceptional incidents. Hate crimes legislation — that fascist exercise in thought control — will never make cruising 100 percent safe, particularly not when “rough trade” is involved, a walk on the wild side with besmirched archangels whose zap of primal energy is one step from savagery. To erase the questing, provocative, limits-testing, and even irrational (because id-driven) element in gay-male cruising is a form of castration — which the glorified nurses and pious hand-holders of the gay activist hierarchy know very well how to do.

Check out the sinister finale of “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” (1961), where the stalked Vivien Leigh becomes Tennessee Williams’ proxy for the extreme sport of gay stranger sex. And re-see last year’s “Gods and Monsters” for gay actor Sir Ian McKellen’s scrupulous charting of the tense pas de deux of trolling, needling and bruising masochistic ecstasy that hasn’t changed much in the gay world since Heliogabalus staged his rambunctious porn games in the Roman imperial palace.

There are serious flaws in the sanctimonious iconography that gay rights groups have been fixated on for the past half-dozen years. Is the small, frail, vulnerable Matthew Shepard (who had health problems from birth) really the ideal image of the gay man to be projected to the mass audience? And doesn’t the constant parading of all-forgiving mothers — whether it’s Judy Shepard, Cher or Betty DeGeneres — simply reinforce the impression that contemporary American homosexuality is a condition of whining juvenility aching for parental approval?

Speaking of the House of DeGeneres (where the ever-teenybopper closets are lined with matching Hush Puppies), I was tipped off by an old friend that at a “queer month” event at the Syracuse University Student Union several weeks ago, the visiting Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche kvetched about my saying two years ago that Anne has “the mental depth of a pancake.” “We hate her,” announced the blonde Bobbsey Twins — a tellingly childish locution from outspoken proponents of hate crimes legislation.

Dear, dear, I guess I struck a nerve. But as long as that exhibitionistic duo keeps courting cameras at glitzy Hollywood events and as long as Ellen keeps draping herself over her mom’s lap for the cover of gay magazines, I’ll go on lobbing my Amazonian darts.

Speaking of dizzy photo hogs, Brad Pitt doubtless thinks he’s very clever by posing in a Pop Art mini-dress and a gay-anal cut-off rubber garden glove for the cover of the Oct. 5 Rolling Stone, but I feel very sorry for his putative girlfriend, the talented Jennifer Aniston, whose once very appealing fleshiness has been manically stripped off until she is now nearly unrecognizable. I’m tired of hearing what a great relationship Pitt and Aniston have. His gay-twitting stunts (such as posing bare bum up for W magazine this summer) have become ostentatious acts of aggression toward her and women in general. I hope Aniston gets her kit out of there before obsessive anxiety consumes her promising career as a character actress.

Another actor, Matthew McConaughey, was arrested for drug possession this week when police, responding to a noise complaint, invaded his Austin, Texas, home in the middle of the night and found marijuana and drug paraphernalia. Alison and I were instantly outraged and were relieved when the drug charge was dropped. Though we have no interest in drugs (we favor the ancient Dionysian tradition of alcohol), we believe that the government has no right to interfere in an individual’s choices about his or her body.

The international drug war is a colossal waste of precious resources that should be diverted to social services. Given the massive drug pushing (Prozac, Ritalin, etc.) by pharmaceutical companies, there is no rationale for banning the sale of natural substances like marijuana. I am on the record as supporting the legalization of drugs, consistent with government regulation of alcohol.

Employers are justified, however, in imposing weekly drug tests on those who operate heavy machinery or who, like train engineers, are charged with the public safety. As a professional actor whose work is psychological, Matthew McConaughey has a perfect right to take whatever drugs he pleases in the sanctity of his own home. But please spare the poor neighbors! They have a right to privacy too.

A foreign exchange student signing himself Mark reports his impressions of the University of California at Berkeley: “I am all too often flabbergasted and disappointed by the extraordinary ignorance and mediocrity I find among the students here. With all due respect, the level of awareness and international, cultural, and historical perspective of the average American seems to be about as high as those of a remote jungle tribe. I thought I was coming to an elite educational institution. Don’t get me started on the teachers. What is your view?”

Mark concludes: “What hope is there for an empire that has grown so powerful its citizens are becoming increasingly detached from the rich world around them, and what may happen if conflict forces them into cultural interactions with others?”

This account from a visitor to America should shake the complacency of the academic establishment. It certainly corroborates what I have been arguing for years, beginning with my 1991 Arion manifesto, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” and my 1992 TLS essay, “The Corrupting of the Humanities in the U.S.” Graduates of even our elite schools know less and less, as the acquisition of hard knowledge has been de-emphasized in favor of “critical thinking” (which sounds good but melts into sloganeering sophistry). In the long run, the security of this country is at risk, as its most highly trained citizens lose the will to defend it.

Paul Ehrlich of Washington, D.C., kindly alerts me to the invocation of my name on the Oct. 4 episode of NBC’s “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” — about which I’d heard only a vague rumor. This was my second prime time epiphany of the season, the first being in the Sept. 20 premiere of NBC’s “Suddenly Susan”: Brooke Shields as a fired reporter defied boss Eric Idle by vowing to follow my example of publishing in Playboy when Ms. wouldn’t have me.

According to Ehrlich, a “Law and Order” detective investigating the murder of a young model makes some “scathing comments about teenage girls in the modeling world”, to which another character retorts, “Well, Camille Paglia calls them modern-day Greek goddesses.” Ehrlich asks, “Did this distort your views?”

Since childhood, I regarded fashion models as works of living sculpture: the flamboyant images from women’s magazines merged in my mind with the statues of Greek goddesses in the Louvre and at Fontainebleau that were pictured in large portfolios that my father brought back from studying Romance languages in France in the early 1950s. The haughty attitudes and iconic gestures of fashion models mesmerized me: as a scruffy tomboy, I had no desire to wear fashion, only to contemplate it.

This early veneration of the fashion model, which I shared with so many gay men but no American lesbian I ever met, is one reason I went hammer and tongs against the anti-fashion, sex-phobic ideology of the Catharine MacKinnon/Andrea Dworkin school that dominated feminism in the 1980s — when the dreary, pedantic, visually inert style of now-defunct Lacanian feminism was also flourishing on campus.

The worship of beauty may be innate in my pagan genes. It’s no coincidence that two Italian-American women (to return to Maggie Balistreri’s earlier point) were instrumental in restoring respect for fashion and beauty to feminism: In a 1991 interview with me, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera headlined my militant prophecy, “Io e Madonna faremo fuori Lacan in USA” (“I and Madonna will drive Lacan from America”).

On Nov. 10, I will be lecturing on “The Romance of Beauty” at the Hirshhorn Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, part of a series accompanying the exhibition “Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century.” When the massive museum catalog arrived last week, I was surprised and pleased to see, emblazoned across a dramatic photo of Madonna ripely bursting out of an 18th century corset, a line from the 1990 New York Times op-ed piece where I fired the first shot in the pro-beauty insurgency: “Changing her costume style and hair color virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty and pleasure.”

Italian-American women get it done!

But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.

Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.

For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.

NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)

The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.

In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.

The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.

This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.

But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.

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.)

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.

Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country.

Because she’s not running for anything.

So Hillary Clinton should be president instead of Barack Obama, because Obama is too partisan and divisive. America needs a bipartisan plan to attack the deficit and also create jobs, and it is Obama’s fault that that is a vague, magical fairy tale. Hillary Clinton will make this fairy tale real, thanks to the fact that, as we all know, Republicans love cheerfully working with the Clintons for the good of the nation. When a Clinton’s in the White House, partisan politics are always put aside!

This is self-evidently dumb on about ten different levels — Clinton won’t run, President Clinton wouldn’t have any more success negotiating with Congressional Republicans than President Obama, Clinton’s popularity is a result of her not being a partisan candidate for office anymore, if there was such a thing as a “bipartisan” plan to reduce the deficit while also stimulating job growth (and protecting entitlements!) we’d presumably have already decided to act on this fantastical plan, everything resembling such a plan is explicitly supported by the White House and rejected by Republicans, Republicans would not endorse said plans if President Obama promised to go away because then they’d simply want to wait for a Republican to take over for him, and Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are not, as they claim to be, Democrats — but the Journal published this regardless, as they always do with fresh tripe from Schoen and Caddell.

Schoen — who works for hypothetical future independent presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, though that fact is never, ever disclosed — is a simple hack, precisely as dumb and unprincipled as you’d expect anyone who was once Mark Penn’s right-hand man to be. Caddell angrily left the Democratic party 20 years ago, which is seldom mentioned when he’s trotted out to trash the president on behalf of the right-wing media outlets that pay his rent. But the fact that they’re classic “Fox Democrats” matters much less than the fact that all of their editorials are predictable, wrong, and patently stupid.

As I said, printing their editorials is an implicit admission that you think your audience is credulous and moronic. The people in charge of the Wall Street Journal are savvy enough about politics to know that all of this is bilge and bullshit. They know both that this will never happen and that it’d be a stupid suggestion even if it were within the realm of possibility. They just don’t care. They don’t care that they’re printing garbage, because they figure garbage will get some traffic from those engaged in the same game.

If I were a conservative American I’d be less outraged at the specter of liberal elites hypothetically disrespecting me from their coastal enclaves and much more pissed off that the people on my side are constantly peddling this bullshit.

Clearly Clinton’s competence is an asset to the president, and her power and credibility reflects well on his ability to work with a former rival. And the Time piece, in particular, makes clear, while praising Clinton, that ultimately Obama makes most of his decisions with a small team of confidantes, and she is not among them. He’s the commander in chief.

And there’s fine reporting in the two pieces. Certainly Clinton deserves credit for using her role to leverage support and resources from other agencies, getting greater control of foreign aid funding and even Defense Department funds to bolster her agenda at State. Elevating the role of the State Department took particular work after George W. Bush ignored and degraded so many American alliances.

But neither piece apportions any share of blame for the downside of Clinton’s expansive diplomacy – her role in pushing a bigger continued U.S. presence in and around Iraq, for instance, flagged Monday by Glenn Greenwald. The continued Iraq presence will also use more of the sometimes lawless private contractors whose role she opposed during the presidential campaign. It also seems a little early to be declaring Libya a decisive victory for American interests, or the cause of human freedom, as the nature of the government that will emerge there remains unclear.

Still, at a time when Obama struggles to get the kind of credit he deserves on the foreign policy and domestic security front – for killing Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaida leaders, winding down the military role in Iraq and toppling Muammar Gaddhafi without losing a single American life – it strikes me as a little unseemly that when credit is given, so much of it goes to Clinton. For her part, at least publicly, Clinton works to turn the spotlight on her boss, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press 10 days ago that “President Obama has passed with flying colors every leadership challenge.” And while she insisted, not convincingly, “I’m out of politics, as you know, David, I don’t comment on it,” she quickly boosted her boss against his potential 2012 rivals.  “I think Americans are going to want to know that they have a steady, experienced, smart hand on the tiller of the ship of state, and there’s no doubt that that’s Barack Obama.”

It feels a little mean-spirited to be raising these questions about Clinton’s coverage on the day she lost her mother, Dorothy Rodham, at 92, but this is the week of the adoring press coverage. Again, I’m a strong Clinton admirer. But there’s something a little odd about the worshipful tone of these pieces. I still see a faint echo of Maureen Dowd’s analysis propping up Clinton and other female administration “hawks” in her continued effort to diminish Obama’s leadership and masculinity.   Dowd seems to be on vacation, or else we might see her to use these two profiles as another reason to pit Clinton against her boss.

I spoke with a close Clinton friend last week who insists the Secretary of State has no interest in either the role of vice president in 2012, or a presidential run in 2016, so I don’t think there’s any crusade for either job behind these admiring stories. Maybe her allies are just trying to make sure she gets credit for the great work she did, against all odds, for a man she was once accused of trying to destroy.