The sudden Mideast crisis has also destabilized the campaign season by resurrecting the long-vexed question of how much of a role Jewish Americans have or have not played in influencing U.S. support of Israel. At the Million Family March organized by the Nation of Islam in Washington last week, a Syrian Muslim jurist blamed what he called (according to the Washington Post) the “Zionist-controlled media” in the U.S. for partisan treatment of the Palestinian cause. While most observers would categorically reject that inflammatory formulation, it must be said that the new medium of the Web has allowed Americans to sample and monitor the far more balanced reportage of Mideast issues in the British, European and Canadian press.

“Conversion to Islam is rising among African-Americans,” stated the headline of a report by Monica Rhor in the Oct. 14 Philadelphia Inquirer. Over the past 40 years, this trend has fostered pro-Arab and occasionally anti-Semitic sentiments among a community that the Democratic Party has come to take for granted as part of its base. Gore’s selection of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, for his running mate was enormously popular among white middle-class professionals and academics of the Northeast but appears to have exacerbated tensions among working-class urban blacks, whose turnout on Election Day is crucial for Gore as well as for Hillary Clinton in the New York Senate race. Unease about the Lieberman nomination was inevitable given that the Gore campaign left blacks off the shortlist of finalists it floated the week before the announcement.

The power of the pro-Israel lobby — which certainly does not include all American Jews, who on the academic left are often Palestinian sympathizers — is demonstrated by Hillary’s embarrassing behavior since she began actively campaigning for the Senate. This longtime supporter of Palestinian statehood who was once on huggy-kissy terms with Suha Arafat has been frantically backpedaling and re-tailoring her words and views to win the support of Jewish voters, who represent between 10 and 12 percent of New York state voters. That there were very few blacks (aside from Hollywood stars) on the official list of 404 “friends” who were invited for discreet White House sleepovers from July 1999 to last August says everything about where the Clintons think the real power lies.

Many Americans, myself included, have wondered for years why our safety and security are compromised by an inflexible foreign policy that has set the entire Muslim world against us. From the 1988 destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center, the American mainstream media has been in denial, blaming those heinous acts of terrorism on small cadres of madmen funded by outlaw regimes — as if the attacks were unrelated to decisions made in Washington. The U.S. is rightly seen by Arabs as the principal guarantor of Israel’s military might, which Americans have underwritten with billions of tax dollars for which there are pressing domestic needs. The media rarely allow Arab views to be heard unfiltered and unframed, and too often, Arabs are portrayed as irrational or medieval, clamoring cartoon figures of no interest until they begin to adopt Western ways.

But pictures tell a thousand stories, breaking through press censorship. The horrors and irreconcilable passions of the Mideast were recently dramatized by the death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, caught in a crossfire as he huddled with his father in a stony street. Then the massacre and barbaric mutilation of two Israeli reservists by laughing, taunting vigilantes at a police station in Ramallah stunned the world. The mob’s frenzy and its use of metal poles and even a window screen to savage the corpses recall the bloody denouement of Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer,” where a pack of Spanish beggar boys hack a rich aesthete to pieces with shards of rusty cans and metal scrap from the dump. It’s the rage sparked by abject powerlessness, the revenge of the exploited and dispossessed that ultimately dehumanizes both sides.

What passed with little commentary by the American media was the widely rebroadcast video footage of what happened later that day, when Israeli helicopter gunships raked the deserted village of Ramallah with pinpoint rocket strikes. The damage was to property, not persons. Nevertheless, it was profoundly disturbing and illustrated better than anything I have ever seen the degree to which the Israelis’ superior firepower, provided by the U.S., has intimidated and brutalized unarmed Palestinians and diverted Arab hatred and rage toward Americans abroad. Those monstrous, high-tech machines, hovering impersonally over Ramallah’s ancient hills packed with simple, square, white houses, reminded me of the terrifying, apocalyptic scenes in the 1953 film “The War of the Worlds,” when Martian airships sweep slowly and unstoppably over Earth’s cities.

Given the intractable sentiments of hard-liners on both sides, from armed Islamic militants who want to obliterate Israel to fundamentalist religious Jews who believe God deeded them the land, I’ve never been optimistic about the “peace process” launched with great fanfare seven years ago by the Oslo accords. If Jews remembered Jerusalem over 1,900 years of diaspora (caused by my own ancestors, the imperial Romans), how could Palestinians be expected to forget, in just 50 years, the land and property they were robbed of by European powers making guilty reparation for European crimes committed against the Jews? To blame Arab nations for failing to make things easier for the West by absorbing the Palestinians into their populations is both futile and ethically problematic.

But Israel is now a fait accompli and remains our most reliable democratic ally in the Middle East, upon which too much of our policy converges because of our overdependence on foreign oil (and fossil fuels in general). It’s difficult to see how the U.S. could ever substantively modify its commitment to a nation with so many intricate connections with high-placed American citizens. On the other hand, Israel’s confidence in American support and economic aid has made its changing governments arrogant and perhaps prolonged the conflict by giving them little reason to compromise. At any rate, much more open debate is necessary about the history of America’s alliance with Israel. Too often, criticism of Israeli policy is punitively policed and treated as if it were rank anti-Semitism.

Now back to domestic politics. A number of Salon readers complained that I ought to have posted prompt assessments of the presidential debates; however, because of my duties as a teacher, this column is now on a triweekly schedule. I did contribute to a Salon roundtable on the first debate, where I felt that the sneering, sighing, compulsively paper-tearing Gore came off as juvenile and weird. About the dull second debate, where a subdued Gore was still too supercilious, I have little to add except that the very vague George W. Bush, with his pursed lips and oddly upright, stock-still posture (to increase his height?), reminded me alternately of Ross Perot and Whistler’s mother.

About the third debate, however, I have a lot to say. The run-with-the-pack commentary by professional journalists about that event was woefully off the mark. The St. Louis debate should go down in history as one of the most stunningly successful uses of TV by a candidate (in this case Bush) since Sen. John F. Kennedy’s charisma overshadowed another experienced, knowledgeable vice president, Richard M. Nixon, in 1960.

Those who thought that Gore won the third debate evidently know little about TV and its relation to the mass audience. After over two decades in politics, Gore showed that neither he nor his advisors fully understand live TV either. Vainglorious about the “1000 town meetings” he claims to have conducted, Gore plunged into the debate thinking he had to impress and convert the immediate audience of allegedly undecided (but suspiciously liberal-sounding) voters sitting in front of him. But after his poor showing in the prior debates, it was the great, invisible array of TV viewers nationwide that he needed to reach.

Gore and his team (including, presumably, his simpering daughter Karenna) made a massive misjudgment about presentation. Gore’s pirouettes, finger-pointing and constant crossing and recrossing of the pit between the bleachers may have struck in-house observers as dynamic and dominant, but his choreography was not keyed to the camera, of which he showed little awareness except when he was prissily sitting or stiffly standing. Gore’s “blocking” of physical space in the circumscribed arena was inept and incoherent. Hence his movements seemed to the TV audience awkward, erratic, febrile, disconnected and chaotic, leaving the viewer with a lingering impression not of presidential authority but of psychological instability.

Add to this Gore’s dreadful failure to modulate his voice for the microphone to communicate effectively with TV viewers, most of whom at that hour were sitting at home or (on the East Coast) preparing to retire for the night. So implacably determined was Gore to score big with the small group in St. Louis that he boomed away at top volume with a forced, monotonous, near-breathless pacing more appropriate to a rah-rah partisan rally. While Bush often seemed like he might not make it to the end of his sentence, Gore seemed to be reciting by rote and muffed some key moments, such as when he couldn’t switch into a convincingly conversational tone to describe being called back to the White House the prior week to be briefed on the Mideast crisis.

The big news, surprisingly, is how Bush reacted to Gore’s hammy, manic affectations. It’s not clear whether this was the result of superb coaching or his own gut instinct, but when it was Bush’s turn to speak, he treated the camera as if it were an intimate, as if he and the viewers at home were in league against a hectoring wind machine. Gore’s deafening, indiscriminate blather became so annoying after a while that whatever Bush said, no matter how disjointed or tottering the syntax, came as a palpably physical relief, like cool rain after a broiling sun. Bush was so sly and deft in undercutting Gore that at one point I said to myself, “This is like Zen!” That is, Bush made himself a reed bending to the wind. He projected modest self-containment — but it was the strategy of a fox.

It’s very difficult for hot-button speakers — as well I know from my own experience with TV production — to mesh live performance with a made-for-TV style. What ebulliently works in person and fills a room comes across as much too strident on the small screen. That my initial reading of the third debate was correct is suggested by Bush’s rise in the polls afterward — to the astonishment of Democratic consultants and their media allies, who have never grasped how Americans choose their presidents. No one wants a glib, smug, smart-alecky elitist in the White House. Professional writers like reporters and academics always overestimate the value of words, which are an unreliable medium for conveying either emotional truth or the grit of concrete reality. (Hence the universal power of the visual arts.)

As I said in my last column, I will be voting for Ralph Nader, since I continue to believe that empowerment of a strong, third-party alternative is the best medicine for the atrophied, programmatic political discourse in this country. The refusal of the liberal major media to cover the Nader campaign — even when historically significant, violent clashes between Democratic union activists and Green Party supporters occurred in the streets outside the first debate in Boston — shows just how repressive things have become.

A Gore victory would simply perpetuate the corrupt, incestuous interconnection of the Democratic National Committee with the major media and with the cash cow Hollywood elite, whose product has not coincidentally become increasingly provincial and mediocre. Limousine liberalism, with its preening ostentation and fatuous complacency, is a threat not only to a genuine progressive politics but also to the future of the American arts. Mawkish p.c. sentimentality is still strangling creativity in too many fields.

As a member of Planned Parenthood who is, as I stated in my last column, fervently committed to unconstrained abortion rights, I must protest the blinkered behavior of fellow Democrats who have let themselves be stampeded by the DNC into thinking that every vote at the local, state and national levels must focus on abortion. This is hysteria and superstition. There should be no shibboleths, no litmus test in weighing the many attributes that a president or a Supreme Court justice should have. Liberals should stop slapping a neon abortion sticker over every political race and start reading and thinking more deeply about the historical complexities of governance and public policy.

As a libertarian, I must also express my opposition yet again to hate crimes legislation, which is not progressive but authoritarian. The government should enforce and even reduce existent laws, not pile on more and more regulation and surveillance, which increase the size and intrusiveness of the state. Hate crimes bills formalize ideological inquiries into motive that smack of the totalitarian thought police. In a democracy, government has no business singling out one or several groups as more worthy of protection than any other individual or group. Justice should be blind.

Speaking of preachy thought police, I’m getting fed up with members of the Libertarian Party who think they own the word “libertarian.” Get off my back, please, and focus your attention on the failures of your party to fine-tune and convey its philosophy credibly to the national electorate. In prior columns, I’ve indicated that the Libertarian Party, which once invited me to submit my name for its presidential nomination, is too conservative for my thinking and also too drearily removed from cultural issues. If and when the Libertarian Party nominates someone like the brilliantly analytical Virginia Postrel, I’ll reconsider my support for the Green Party, whose current brand of socialism is indeed excessive. (See Postrel’s latest –”Ironic Processing,” a fascinating dissection in the November issue of Reason magazine of Gore’s chillingly depersonalized worldview.)

In this home stretch of the campaign, it’s wonderfully ironic to see how Democratic strategists are implicitly admitting that last May’s gun-control gambit, the Million Mom March, was a great big flop. It simply outraged and energized the Republican base and alienated gun-owning Democratic union members, whom Gore is now courting with late-in-the-game, pro-hunters talk. Because of its openness toward its readership, Salon was literally the only forum in the national media that gave the articulate voices of law-abiding gun owners the space and respect they deserve. Yes, it was in this column, on Feb. 2, Feb. 23, March 15, May 17, and June 7 (“The Gun Letters”).

Since this is my last column before the election, I am nurturing a tiny flame of hope that when we meet again, Hillary Clinton will be yesterday’s news — whipped off by the wind like the pungent, oily wrap of a fish-and-chips takeaway on the Thames Embankment. If that ruthless woman, with her checkered history of deceit and incompetence, is elected to the Senate, it’s only through the collusion of the major media. A fresh example: Last weekend, the New York Times finally (16 months too late) published a probing article about Hillary’s 1993 healthcare fiasco. But what curious timing: The very next day, the Times formally endorsed her.

There are so many squalid examples of media manipulation that I do wonder about the odd allegations that come in to this column over the transom. For instance, several letters this month questioned the authenticity of the well-known photograph of Gore that his official Web site claims was taken in Vietnam. They insist that his gear is nontropical and would be issued only at a training site on the American mainland. They also argue that Gore was not entitled by rank to wear the dress uniform he sports in his wedding photo. I would be very interested in clarification of these matters from readers with special knowledge of military technicalities.

On the pop front, I was most gratified by the letters that poured in from readers enthusiastically agreeing with my admiration for Meredith Baxter’s performance in Lifetime cable channel’s “The Betty Broderick Story.” Because it has principally been on TV, Baxter’s work has never received the critical respect it deserves.

On the other hand, I was taken aback by the many letters upbraiding me for taking Madonna seriously, despite my reservations about her new album. Showbiz today is built on sand. Young people have little sense of the pop revolution wrought by Madonna in her glory years (1983-92). But why should they? It’s all ancient history to them, even if we Madonna fans will never lose the faith. (Will the aging Madonna turn into Bette Davis? I’ve joked about Davis, “They had to beat that woman into the grave with a shovel!”) Perhaps my most reprinted article worldwide is “Venus of the Radio Waves,” a survey of Madonna’s rise that was commissioned in 1991 by London’s Independent and is available in my first essay collection.

I was saddened three weeks ago by the death at age 53 of Benjamin Orr (born Orzechowski), bassist for the Cars. Orr’s yearning lead vocal on the Cars’ 1984 hit, “Drive,” combined with his dreamy performance on the ingenious, sinister video, was a high-water mark in American pop. What depth of feeling Orr had, what complex layers of artistry. The “Drive” video (where Orr sometimes resembled one of my favorite poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge) was released at a magic moment when the now-debased MTV was cutting-edge and when rock videos were a revolutionary new art form.

Readers keep asking my opinion about the controversial white rapper Eminem. My first remarks about him appear in the current issue of TV Guide, where Eminem’s devil tail amusingly ends up on the next page pointing at my picture — quite appropriately for a lifelong fan of Their Satanic Majesties, the Rolling Stones. I also got a chuckle out of being paired with Boy George on the table of contents page. (Now there’s an odd couple! I see us in a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with me as the crabby professor.)

Further items on the TV desk: For a brief, somewhat hokey moment on last week’s profile of Annette Funicello on A&E’s “Biography,” a fortuneteller deals tarot cards from the gorgeous “Aquarian” deck designed in 1970 by David Palladini. Reproductions of Palladini’s cards were once on sale everywhere as posters and postcards. The first one shown in the Funicello program (where it dramatized a childhood prophecy that she would be a famous entertainer) was “Fortitude,” whom Palladini depicted as a mustached warrior in elegant, art deco armor. That very poster, along with oversize posters of the Rolling Stones, hung in my office at Bennington College throughout the tumultuous 1970s. Who, I still wonder, is the mysterious, oracular, gifted Palladini?

More on TV: I’m disappointed I couldn’t follow through on comedian Joy Behar’s tantalizing invitation to serve as her “lifeline” two weeks ago on ABC’s “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” Alas, the six-hour time blocks required to be on call ate prohibitively into prior commitments. Readers of my work know what a longstanding fan I am of Behar’s razor-sharp, Italian-American wit, which she now exercises to often daringly bawdy effect on ABC’s hit daytime show, “The View.” Behar is a master of the dying art of improv.

I happily confessed my religious devotion to Joseph Mankiewicz’s classic film “All About Eve” in an Oct. 13 “diary” piece for the Times of London. Every week, a different writer comments on the week’s public and private events. By chance, my assigned date followed Columbus Day, so of course I waxed furious at the impugning of Christopher Columbus by leftist activists in the U.S. — the kind of defamation that the National Italian-American Foundation will no longer tolerate.

Two weeks ago, in a talk about the history of sex at the Gotham Center of the City University of New York, my companion, Alison Maddex, announced the formation of her own organization to build an international museum devoted to sex. She has severed ties with her former business partner, Daniel Gluck. I too have terminated all professional connection with him. Let this serve as public notice that my name may not be used in conjunction with any enterprise by Gluck, nor do I endorse or recommend any project or proposal with which he is associated.

Postscript: On Nov. 11, I will be giving a lecture called “The Internet Revolution” at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

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.