Bush talked about Iraq, foreign policy, the economy and life after he leaves the White House. But the question on the minds of most of the guests was a little less lofty.

“Somebody in the audience said, ‘Don’t you think Mitt Romney would make a terrific vice president?’” Lee Hanley, an Arizona developer who flew up from Phoenix for the fundraiser, told Salon. “There’s no doubt that a lot of people would love to see Gov. Romney on the ticket.” (Bush apparently demurred, saying it was up to McCain.)

By the time McCain was finished with him this winter, you’d have figured the last thing Romney would want to do would be help out his former rival. McCain had taunted and bullied Romney through the primary season, beating him handily in almost every state they competed in and, finally, showing up to campaign in Romney’s adopted hometown for no apparent reason other than to be obnoxious.

But a funny thing has happened over the past few months: Romney has become one of McCain’s biggest fans. Within a week of dropping out of the race, Romney sent word out through his organization to get on board with the nominee. His political apparatus is rapidly integrating with McCain’s — in Iowa, for example, where McCain barely campaigned last winter, Romney’s former state director is running McCain’s operation. In Michigan, possibly the GOP’s top priority this fall, Romney has been showing up often to put his deep roots in the state to work for McCain. Romney appears on TV whenever the McCain team wants him to, pushing the latest talking points with that same achingly earnest manner he showed all through the primaries.

“I’m appreciative every time I see Mitt on television on my behalf,” McCain said this month. “He does a better job for me than he did for himself, as a matter of fact.”

The fervor with which Romney and his team have enlisted may not be entirely due to GOP loyalty, though. As the economy emerged as the election’s key issue, and Romney grew more and more comfortable working on McCain’s behalf, supporters who ended the primary season wondering what steps they needed to take to keep Romney’s chances alive for the next GOP presidential primary contest started wondering if he might be busy even sooner than that. While no one in Romney’s inner circle will admit it publicly, his allies are doing all they can to set up their man as McCain’s running mate.

Insiders say you can’t campaign openly for the job of vice president — it tends to backfire if you look too eager. “He’s doing what they ask him to do, and he enjoys it,” one former Romney advisor said. “I think if he really thought he was auditioning for vice president, he wouldn’t be as good.” But Romney’s supporters — and Romney — are doing what’s needed to make him an option. The effort is far more implicit than explicit, with the assumption that as Romney’s former backers work for McCain, his value in McCain’s eyes will go up.

“He understood that as he came out of this last cycle, there were people who were kind of angry with him,” said one former close Romney advisor, who like most of his confidants, wouldn’t speak without a guarantee of anonymity. “He’s trying to say, ‘Here’s who I really am, I am a team player.’ He has done enough right now for the McCain people to say, ‘Mitt Romney stood up to the plate and did what we needed him to do.’”

Though every one of McCain’s would-be running mates is also trying to show his or her value, Romney’s got some high-profile backers weighing in, and as a former rival for the nomination, his efforts on McCain’s behalf may be even more useful. Karl Rove, for instance, has said repeatedly he’d pick the former Massachusetts governor if he were in charge. (He’s not in charge, but he does consult frequently with the small circle of McCain aides who are looking at potential candidates.)

Romney’s confidants say they can’t get a good read on what the McCain team is thinking, and they say they aren’t phoning in to lobby for their man. “I don’t think there’s any news coming out of anything I would call a reliable channel,” said Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman and a D.C. lobbyist who was a senior Romney advisor during the primaries. (Another Romney counselor estimated he might have a 20 percent shot at the job — which, this advisor said, would put his chances higher than anyone else’s.) As for Romney himself, he has been on back-to-back vacations, first in Canada, then in New Hampshire, and hasn’t told his supporters whether he has submitted any vetting documents to McCain’s legal team.

As a possible running mate, Romney’s strengths are fairly obvious — he’s telegenic, he’s seen as knowledgeable on economic issues, he’s a prolific fundraiser and he could help in some swing states. So are his weaknesses — his religion could hurt him with some voters, and as the primary race showed, he’s not always the strongest campaigner.

As the Park City dinner showed, he has spurred his financial team to raise money for McCain. On a conference call with supporters in February, around the time he endorsed McCain, he left no doubt that he wanted them to keep writing checks — just payable to a different guy. Before leaving for vacation this month, Romney officially notified federal regulators that he wouldn’t try to get back any of the millions of dollars he dumped into his own campaign — freeing his donors to give to McCain without having to save any cash for Romney.

McCain and his aides used to openly dislike Romney. Top strategists jokingly nicknamed him “Damien,” after the kid in “The Omen” who grows up to become the antichrist. (The McCain campaign’s sense of humor is rarely subtle.) Back when they were competing against each other, McCain would decline to answer questions about Romney’s character, but in a way that made it clear he wished he could unload on the guy. No matter how helpful Romney might be in Michigan or in fundraising, it seemed like personal disdain would get in the way of putting him on the ticket.

That has now changed. “McCain didn’t know Romney very well” back when they were running against each other, senior advisor Charlie Black told Salon. “We were in a tough-fought primary campaign, but they’ve spent a lot of time together in the last several months, and they’ve gotten to know each other a lot better, and there’s both respect and like there.” A former Romney aide agreed, saying the more the two men have campaigned together, the more they’ve bonded. “Six hours on a plane sitting next to somebody, you either are going to like them a lot or you’re going to hate them in the end,” the aide said. “Every single personality tic or every single mannerism is either going to drive you insane, or you’ll find it endearing.”

On Romney’s end, allies insist the fights with McCain were never personal. “I had plenty of opportunities to be in private settings with [Romney] in which some flippant comments could be made,” said Jason Rose, who ran Romney’s campaign in Arizona, McCain’s home state, where many Republicans have clashed with the nominee over the years. “He was always very respectful.”

And now Romney finds himself at the top of some shortlists in the media, waiting for an assignment from the man who beat him. “He’s going to do anything he can to help,” a former aide said. “If McCain called him and said, ‘Hey Mitt, I need you to go sit and stuff envelopes for two weeks in Columbus, Ohio,’ he’d be like, OK, we’re getting on a plane.’ If McCain said, ‘I need you to be V.P.,’ he’d say, OK, I’m going to be V.P.’”

So Wallace, following a 92nd Street Y panel last night, said this:

“There will be pressure to elevate a woman but there will be an equal amount of pressure to pick someone who is prepared,” Wallace said.

And then she said this:

Wallace flagged one female official in particular who she thinks would be a good choice this year.

“Nikki Haley — she’s great,” she said. “She’s the most effective surrogate Romney has.”

If the Sarah Palin problem was a problem of preparation and vetting, Haley … might present some issues? Specifically an odd and mostly unsubstantiated sex scandal and also these rumors that she might at any moment be indicted on tax charges. The tax thing might be bullshit and the affair story was the product of a self-promoting creep but they’re “out there,” as they say.

More important, Haley has been governor of South Carolina since January of 2011. As in very slightly longer than one year. And slightly less time being a governor than Sarah Palin had in 2008. It’s almost as if Wallace is making a pick not based on the principle of Who Would Be Best For the Nation but on demographics and optics?

Wallace also apparently suggested Carly Fiorina, which, lol. Romney/Ex-CEO who famously received a giant golden parachute when she was forced out of her company 2012, everyone! Just the ticket for the new economy.

That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it’s unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it’s to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could’ve dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into the film. Soon we’re watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You remember the “SNL” sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you don’t, “Game Change” airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either live or on YouTube when they happened.

Moore’s performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For one thing, she doesn’t hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve Schmidt — the film’s protagonist — as a grizzled, “too old for this shit” campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark Salter, McCain’s “conscience.” Salter, the primary author of his “Maverick” mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the war room applauds her first speech.

But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann’s primary sources, and we watch them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin’s ignorance at exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by her ignorance.

Because it’s Hollywood, there’s very little politics in the film’s depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare, in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision is made, it means “we’ll lose by five.”

There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent. Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn’t vote. They embrace.

The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to “unfair” — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to “the base” because of Palin’s heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn — “if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!” — after “winning” her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)

The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. “Game Change” is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn’t. (At one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin reinforced, well, there are still those “SNL” sketches.

In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster, but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t know what the Fed did. Do we have any proof John McCain knew what it should’ve done? Maybe everyone actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.

There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still  un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.

The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.

Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:

In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)

Oh, the Washington Times.

Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”

As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.

Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.

Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.

But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.

*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.