Alas, the principal distinction between the political parties these days seems to be that Democrats are media-savvy — and indeed incestuously intertwined with the Hollywood glitterati — while Republicans are still living in the dinosaur age of communications, where good intentions are s-p-e-l-l-e-d out as tediously as in a one-room schoolhouse. In this age of the image, Republican operatives have the visual sense of Mr. Magoo.

The first Republican counter-ad, which is still running and running here and may lead to mass suicide by maddened voters, bizarrely resembles a Democratic attack ad. Ostensibly promoting Bush’s commitment to educational reform (one of his few solid positives), it shows him standing stiff as a department-store dummy during his convention acceptance speech, as he squints and mush-mouths through a few sentences while inept cutaways flash generic children in generic classrooms. Never in my political memory has there been a major ad so amateurish and self-destructive, fixing a view of the Texas governor as stolid and stupid in the minds of Pennsylvania voters.

Hence I’m not surprised in the least by the Republican nominee’s recent slide in the polls. Actually, Bush would probably make a competent, if not great president. He’s no verbal whiz, but as I said in this column last spring, much of the national electorate is sick and tired of the glib, smartass Ivy League establishment and its alumni network of casuistic lawyers and snide media coteries. Maybe the country could use a nice, stiff dose of West Texas dust and the old, strike-it-rich romance of black crude. (See “Giant,” the 1956 film now a TV staple, where the oil baron is played by rebel icon James Dean.)

While I strongly agree (evidently with a plurality of male voters) that the U.S. military urgently needs rebuilding after its gutting and demoralizing misuse by the Clinton administration, there is little else in the Republican platform that I as a pro-choice feminist Democrat can identify with. There is something very wrong with a party that has stifled and stunted one of its brightest stars, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, because of her moderate views on abortion. Whitman, whose articulateness and command of the issues far surpass Bush’s, should have been our first female president.

On the other hand, despite having voted twice for Bill Clinton, I loathe the present leadership of the Democratic Party, which has been corrupted by the ruthless Clinton sleaze machine. I’d like to put the entire Democratic National Committee out to sea without an oar (see Giricault’s “Raft of the ‘Medusa’”). What a bunch of slimy hypocrites, proclaiming the cause of “the People” while condescending to them. Al Gore’s convention acceptance speech last month nauseated me: the shameless demagoguery and chicken-in-every-pot false promises; the amoral use as stage props of pre-selected persons in the audience, including a near-hysterical couple with a baby with a birth defect; the shockingly cursory attention paid to national defense and international affairs — which shows exactly what’s wrong with the Democratic Party, with its unctuous pose as Mother of Many Teats to the suffering masses.

My dilemma as a voter is that while I endorse the populist principles of the Democratic Party at its best (Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter look awfully good at this distance), the present party is overrun by slick, white, upper-middle-class bureaucrats, lawyers and flacks spouting divisive identity-politics propaganda. At the start of the primary season, when I supported Bill Bradley (for whom I voted), I still felt that Gore was superbly prepared to assume the presidency, despite his troubling record of exaggerations, fibs and unnecessarily sycophantish endorsements of the disgraced Bill Clinton. But Gore’s manic, undignified scramble for a persona and his ruthless lies about Bradley’s record have poisoned my view of him, perhaps irreparably.

At this time, I don’t think it’s necessarily in the best interest of the country to protract the Clinton-Gore scandals for another four years. While it’s theoretically possible that Gore could still convince me that he’s fundamentally a person of character and integrity, I am currently planning to vote for Ralph Nader. This country’s political dynamics and discourse would be vastly improved by a strong third-party alternative — which neither the Reform nor Libertarian parties, or even the present Green Party ticket on which Nader is running, has yet been able to provide.

As for Gore’s vice presidential choice, Joseph Lieberman, I was at first very impressed with his intelligence, sobriety and forthrightness but have turned skeptical over his eager, bouncing-puppy abandonment of his former centrist convictions. Though the Northeastern media has been predictably rapturous about Lieberman, a Connecticut senator with the learned yet whimsical demeanor of a college professor, I’m not so sure how he’ll go over in the rest of the country, where he may look like a Howdy Doody doll. The flat, laconic, no-crap style of the Republican vice presidential nominee, phlegmatic Dick Cheney, plays better in the rural West and Midwest.

From day one, I suspected that the media’s giddy triumphalism over Lieberman’s Jewishness, combined with his own over-the-top thanks to God for the alleged “miracle” of his nomination, may end up depressing Election Day turnout in working-class African-American neighborhoods, where blatant anti-Semitism persists. It remains to be seen whether Hillary Clinton’s senatorial bid in New York has been helped or hurt by the Lieberman nomination, since the gain in Jewish support may be offset by voter apathy among urban blacks, the only group where her poll numbers are vastly higher than those of her home-grown Republican opponent, Rick Lazio.

Lieberman’s pompous, vainglorious religiosity hasn’t bothered me too much as an atheist, though I believe faith should be kept private except when it directly affects a politician’s reasoning about a public-policy issue. Hence I think it quite legitimate for conservatives to cite the Bible or Koran in debates over abortion or gay rights, as long as the final decision is left to the voters and as long as the government itself never privileges or “establishes” a single religion.

Given the grotesque dependence of the Democratic Party on Hollywood cash and flash, I question how seriously a Gore-Lieberman administration would pursue government scrutiny and control of excessive sex and violence in mass media. However, it’s not immorality but a disastrous decline in artistic quality that’s the real problem with the entertainment industry. Considering the appalling mediocrity of the Academy Awards show this year, there may be a direct correlation between Tinseltown’s Democratic socialite liberalism and its ignorance of the country at large.

Violent pop doesn’t spawn violence in most kids anyhow; it’s their adrenaline oasis in the banal suburban desert. As for sex, viva Britney Spears and her “stripper chic”! Mass media should not be blamed for the failure of busy, selfish parents to provide high culture and intellectual stimulation at home. As I’ve said in the past, if the ultra-p.c. National Endowment for the Arts had done its job, classical music radio stations would be thriving in every town in America.

Whatever my ambivalence about Joe Lieberman, I love his wife Hadassah. From the moment she was introduced by Tipper Gore in Nashville and began emotionally gesticulating and invoking the spirits of her murdered ancestors, I was captivated. Hadassah reminds me of the intense, brilliant, hip, vivacious Jewish girls of the 1960s who were my classmates from downstate New York at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Tipper, whom I’ve always liked, was also at her best that day — saucily whipping out her camera like Liv Ullmann in “Persona” to snap the audience before she opened the proceedings.

The same cannot be said of the Gores’ over-promoted eldest daughter Karenna, the most fatuous product of the Ivy League since — well, her pal Naomi Wolf, who has the same smug, head-tossing, tooth-baring narcissism. Despite the breathless media huzzahs, Karenna’s speech introducing her father at the convention was so dopey and ludicrous that I practically fell out of my chair with laughter. It was like a drag parody of the classic “I stepped on the Ping-Pong ball” routine by the airhead, country-club blond (skillfully played by Joanna Barnes) in “Auntie Mame.” Karenna may perversely help the Republicans if the Gore campaign is dumb enough to send that simpering WASP princess out to stump among African-American women voters.

The strongest performance by a woman at either convention this summer was certainly by Condoleezza Rice, rumored to be the top candidate to head the National Security Council in a Bush administration. The media betrayed their Democratic bias by the networks’ refusal to broadcast the first night of the Republican Convention, when two prominent African-Americans, Rice and Colin Powell, spoke and by their disgraceful failure to document afterwards the grace and power of Rice’s presentation. She was also terrific offstage with her cool, crisp way of putting journalists in their place. I knew little about Rice before that night, but I’m now convinced that this geopolitical analyst and former campus administrator could be on track for the presidency.

If the Age of Clinton is truly, blessedly over — which would require the defeat of both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton in November — the big winners would be ambitious women politicians with their eye on the White House for 2004. A Bush victory would give international stature and experience to Rice and encourage other moderate Republican women to move up, as the present fagged-out generation of bad-toupee, good-ole-boy philistines vacates the Republican leadership.

On the Democratic side, with Gore and Hillary out of the picture, there would be strong candidates for the presidency like Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of, yes, Arkansas. The quiet, reserved Lincoln, who has thus far deferred to senior colleagues, positively exudes the calm composure that would be ideal for our first woman commander in chief. Anyone watching the Democratic Convention with both eyes open (not always easy) could see that Barbara Boxer, the strident senator from California, is already packaging herself for a presidential run.

Holy Hecate, is Boxer (whose daughter wed and shed Hillary’s brother) an obnoxious piece of work! Comic turn of the season may have been when poor Hadassah Lieberman could barely stagger to the convention podium with Boxer dragging on her arm to keep herself in camera range. It reminded me of that priceless piece of farce in “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972) when a befuddled, tuxedo-clad man limps heavily into a hotel ballroom with Madeline Kahn, face down on the floor, gripping him tenaciously by the ankle.

Considering how many thousands of journalists were credentialed by the Republican and Democratic conventions, the quality of American reportage was abysmal. The American media have turned into a schmoozing herd of sappy clones, rarely deviating from the cocktail-hour party line lest they compromise their future job prospects. In my opinion, top honors for political commentary this summer unquestionably go to Jonah Goldberg, online editor of the National Review. His deftly written pieces were always fresh, smart, independent and often scathingly funny.

The Goldberg clan is flourishing: Lucianne.com, sponsored by Jonah’s formidable mother, Lucianne, is one of the most fascinating reads on the Web. Whenever I go online, the first thing I check is the Drudge Report (I respect Matt Drudge as a pugnacious American original and Web pioneer), and the last thing is Lucianne.com, which I reserve as a special pleasure for its cornucopia of political articles culled by readers from newspapers all over America and the world. It’s an essential antidote to the overt partisanship and devious news management of the New York Times, whose standards have slipped alarmingly over the past 20 years.

Of course I cheered when George W. Bush recently called a New York Times reporter a “major league asshole,” and I immediately began a mental list of major and minor league assholes not only at the Times but at the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Village Voice, etc. After a decade as a controversial public figure, I’ve seen them all! Their flatulence may be a major factor in global warming.

Other summer matters: Given the verve with which this column has waxed acrimonious over Anne Heche’s parasitic attachment to the hapless Ellen DeGeneres, some might well wonder about my reaction to the breakup last month of that publicity-addled pair. Was it a giggle, a guffaw, a horselaugh? OK, all of the above — mostly at the image of the delirious, scantily clad Heche wandering like a pixie-cut John the Baptist in the California desert.

Yes, it was as if Heche were reliving Marion Crane’s flight from Phoenix in “Psycho” (in the very bad remake of which she very badly starred). But maybe Heche was hunting for the crop-dusting plane of “North by Northwest” to hop to Toronto for her next film gig and love victim. Ms. d.t.’s sure splatted a mushroom cloud of DDT over DeGeneres’ extraordinary comic gift — which is barely twitching these days in its suffocating cornfield of messianic p.c. clichis.

Given the virulent antipathy of the West Coast gay establishment to me and my views, it was ironic that Anne and Ellen imploded and Melissa Etheridge spilled the beans about her abusive upbringing just as the September issue of the San Francisco lesbian magazine Girlfriends, with me on the cover, was arriving at newsstands. Editor in chief Heather Findlay deserves enormous credit for pursuing the feature on me against resistance from inside and outside her staff. (“Are you nuts?” was among the more charitable things said to her, according to the editor’s note.)

That it took 10 years for any lesbian magazine in the U.S. or U.K. to deal honestly with my life and work shows exactly what’s wrong with the insular gay world, where outdated Foucault flacks and toadying campus careerists are mistaken for intellectuals. Too many gays who demand “tolerance” and “diversity” these days are viciously intolerant when it comes to opinions differing from their own. The Girlfriends interview (titled “Paglia 101: Confessions of a Campus Radical”) explores hot-button issues like the genesis of homosexuality and the campaign against Dr. Laura Schlessinger. I hope that Findlay’s editorial courage marks a turning point in the attitude of the gay press toward dissent and free thought.

Pop talk: two summer highlights. First was the riveting profile of Ingrid Bergman on Lifetime’s “Intimate Portrait,” where her fiercely glamorous daughters minced no words about her indifference to family relationships and her devotion to her art. The program wonderfully showed how Bergman (one of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite stars) lived for the camera. Her hieratic concentration is exactly what’s missing from today’s Oscar-gathering mouse herd of girly-girls and dough boys.

Second was the documentary “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” which made a sensation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and which I was lucky enough to see in a tape sent me by producer-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. I think this is the best film about American culture in years. It puts Hollywood productions like the specious “American Beauty” to shame. Bailey and Barbato’s international production company, World of Wonder, is one of the most creative ateliers at work today. I have followed their accelerating careers with great interest ever since they were perhaps the very first to interview me on film at my university in the early 1990s. (It was for a documentary for British television on New York’s drag festival, Wigstock, when few academics would go on camera to defend drag queens.)

Salon reader Jeff Percifield writes from Oakland, Calif.:

Like you, I’m a longtime soap fan but have finally been driven away by the networks’ switch to sappy teen trauma storylines. “The Days of Our Lives,” “All My Children,” “One Life to Live,” and your fave, “The Young and the Restless,” have all sunk under a wave of adolescent angst that couldn’t be less interesting. Even ballsy Jill on “Y&R” is reduced to fretting about the kids’ prom. Give me a grown-up catfight any day between Nikki, Diane and Ashley over this watered-down “90210″ dreck! Think this is the end of the line for soaps?

Mr. Percifield, you express my own angst with painful eloquence. I’ve been exasperated all summer by the boring, picayune, molasses-slow non-plot on “The Young and the Restless” — though of course I always perk up when feisty, sensual Nikki or smoldering, high-testosterone Victor is onscreen. Have “Y&R” producers gone into suspended animation, like the ill-fated, crystal-casket travelers in “2001: A Space Odyssey”? How idiotic to bring back that redheaded tigress, the abundantly talented Michelle Stafford, and then make her hunker over a computer screen in trivial service to a passel of teenage dimwits. Soaps have steadily lost their emotional soul as well as their flamboyant high camp. Fans, let’s storm the networks!

Thanks to the Salon reader calling herself (or himself) Greta Hohenzoellern, who alerted me to the very amusing feature by Lisa Whipple in McSweeney’s, which ingeniously extracts and lists the self-describing appositional phrases and Iliadic epithets from my Salon columns over the years. May all believers in wifty “Grrrlpower” hear the true voice of the Amazon!

Postscript: I have been promoted to university professor at the University of the Arts, where I’ve taught since 1984. I have also left the Department of Liberal Arts to join the new College of Media and Communication, where I will focus on the development of interdisciplinary, inter-arts courses. However, I will retain the title professor of humanities and media studies.

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.