This is interesting -- Politico is reporting that one of the names floated by the people leading Barack Obama's search for a running mate is Ann Veneman. The surprising thing about that? Veneman is a Republican, and she served in George W. Bush's cabinet, as Secretary of Agriculture, during his first term.

"The search committee, now led by Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder, raised Veneman's name -- among others -- in discussions with members of Congress, two Democrats familiar with the conversations said," Politico reports. "The mention of Veneman's name surprised Democratic lawmakers. The low-profile Republican was close to food and agriculture industries but clashed with farm-state Democrats and environmentalists during her tenure, which lasted from 2001 to 2004... Veneman's is one of about a dozen names suggested by vetters in a round of meetings with members of the House and Senate within the last few weeks."

Even given the political advantages to the pick, like the non-partisan message it would send and the appeal it might have for independents and women, it's still sort of hard to see this happening, given the Bush administration's unpopularity and what would almost certainly be a lot of displeasure on the Democratic side of things.

Apparently the chance to appear in public with both President Bush and John McCain in one week isn't as much of a draw as it used to be.

Most of the Republican candidates in this fall's marquee Senate races are either skipping the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn., or trying to duck questions about whether they'll make it there or not, National Journal's Erin McPike reports. That's a sharp contrast from four years ago, when nearly any Republican running for statewide office anywhere not only flocked to New York for the party's convention but scheduled as many fundraisers during the week as they could possibly cram into their days and nights. Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Wayne Schaeffer, who's trying to hold a Colorado seat for the Republicans, have all ruled out attending. Incumbents Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina, Gordon Smith in Oregon, John Sununu in New Hampshire and Roger Wicker in Mississippi, as well as candidates John Kennedy in Louisiana and Steve Pearce in New Mexico, say they're not sure whether they'll be there.

None of the GOP candidates or their aides will say they're skipping the convention because the party as a whole isn't that popular with run-of-the-mill voters, of course. Stevens has to stay home for a primary that week (as does his Democratic opponent, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich). Most of them say they just don't have time to leave the campaign trail in their home states to go hobnob for a week.

But if you're, say, Gordon Smith, trying to hold onto your seat in the state where a Barack Obama rally drew 75,000 people this spring, chances are you aren't really looking forward to being part of daily features on the Oregon delegation to McCain's convention in local newspapers around the state. (If you were, you probably wouldn't have run a TV ad that tried to make voters think Obama had endorsed you.) Besides the chance to raise some money -- and maybe commiserate with other endangered Republican incumbents -- there isn't much upside for GOP candidates in going to the convention.

This sort of thing isn't unprecedented. Plenty of candidates don't spend the entire week at their party's convention -- four years ago, then Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle left Boston early to head back to South Dakota (and then ran a TV ad similar to Smith's, featuring him hugging Bush, while the Republicans gathered a couple of weeks later). Still, even if candidates drop in for only a day or two, it can't be a good sign for their campaign that they don't feel like they can spend the entire week away from the trail. Most of the Democratic candidates in these races say they'll definitely be going to Denver for Obama's convention.

The consulting firm headed by Karl Rove is out with the latest in its series of Electoral College maps, and this one (available in PDF form here) shows Barack Obama coasting to a win over John McCain.

This newest map, which is put together based on averages of state-by-state polling, differs sharply from other maps that the firm produced in May. Those had shown Hillary Clinton beating McCain but Obama trailing. Now, Rove's firm sees Obama winning 22 states, plus the District of Columbia, for a total of 272 Electoral College votes -- two more than the 270 needed for victory. McCain has 21 states and 183 Electoral College votes in his column, and seven states, which combine for a total of 83 Electoral College votes, are considered tossups.

There's some very good news in here for Obama. NBC's First Read blog observes that "per this map -- right now -- Obama could lose every toss-up state (Ohio, New Hampshire, Florida, Nevada) and still win the presidential election." As First Read also notes, though, the recent polling from Quinnipiac that showed Obama trending down in four potentially key states -- Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin -- was not taken into account. (The map shows Obama winning all four states.)

A graph of the trend in polling that accompanies the map is also interesting; it shows Obama way up overall -- and McCain way down -- since early June. But the week between July 13 and July 19 was a bad one for Obama, as he went from 296 Electoral College votes on July 13 to the current 272. As always, my standard disclaimers about polling done this far away from Election Day apply both to the trends and to the map itself.

The sordid story of an alleged affair between former Sen. John Edwards and Rielle Hunter has popped up again, courtesy of a National Enquirer article saying that the paper's reporters caught Edwards going to meet with Hunter and the couple's purported "love child" at a Los Angeles hotel.

I know what you're thinking: Why even bother with anything printed by the Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid you probably think of as the kind of "newspaper" that focuses on rumors that Elvis Presley is alive -- and leading a band of rampaging space aliens? That's certainly the message Editor and Publisher's Greg Mitchell sent in an item he published at the Huffington Post on Friday. That's not really the Enquirer's niche, though. It gets confused with publications like the defunct Weekly World News, but in fact the Enquirer is surprisingly good at reporting on these kinds of stories, and it has a decent track record with them. It was the Enquirer that published the photo of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart's lap. It was the Enquirer that broke the story of Rush Limbaugh's addiction to painkillers. And new information about the Edwards story makes the Enquirer's reporting on it look more solid.

The Enquirer had first alleged that Edwards and Hunter were having an affair last year; it later reported that Hunter was pregnant with Edwards' child, though Andrew Young, a friend of Edwards', has said the baby is his. The latest chapter in the saga happened earlier this week, when reporters from the paper claimed that they spotted Edwards -- and confronted him -- at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night after being told beforehand that the former Democratic vice-presidential nominee would be there to meet with Hunter and the baby.

These stories have largely been ignored by the mainstream press, but new details that emerged Friday lend some credibility to the Enquirer's account, though they're not proof of it. FoxNews.com has now published a story based on an interview with one of the security guards at the hotel, who gave an account of intervening "between a man he identified as former Sen. John Edwards and tabloid reporters who chased down the former presidential hopeful."

From the FoxNews.com article:

The Beverly Hilton Hotel guard said he encountered a shaken and ashen-faced Edwards -- whom he did not immediately recognize -- in a hotel men's room early Tuesday morning in a literal tug-of-war with reporters on the other side of the door ...

"His face just went totally white," the guard said, when Edwards was told the reporters were shouting out questions about Edwards and Rielle Hunter ...

The guard later confirmed Edwards' identity after being shown a photograph.

The story also notes that "the Enquirer says it has videotape showing Hunter entering the room where she met Edwards, and shows Edwards leaving the same room. However, the Enquirer has thus far declined repeated requests by FOXNews.com to release any photographs or videotape evidence of the incident."

There have been complaints from some quarters about the silence from the mainstream media that greeted the publication of the Enquirer story, as well as allegations of bias. Personally, I think it comes down to a few factors, none of them bias.

First, Edwards didn't get that much coverage in the first place, and he's not thought of as a really serious contender to be Barack Obama's running mate, so it's unlikely that major outlets will devote to this story the substantial assets required to do reporting on it. Without doing that, it's unlikely many outlets will report on the story based entirely on the Enquirer's allegations. Even if editors and reporters believe that the story is true and the reporting is solid, it would look odd for a paper like, say, the New York Times to print a story that came solely from the Enquirer. There's also the jealousy factor -- taking the Times as an example again, the paper of record really doesn't want to admit that it got scooped by a tabloid. And, last, there's the Elizabeth Edwards factor. Reporters are especially careful in a case like this, because of Elizabeth Edwards' illness.

On Friday, John McCain's campaign put out a memo that purports to debunk that "three prevailing myths about Barack Obama's foreign policy ... [that] work to Obama's benefit, are indeed propagated by his campaign at times, but have no real basis in fact." The memo, written by Randy Scheunemann, a senior advisor to McCain, is separated into three sections, each with its own "myth" and countervailing "fact." But it's the memo itself that's full of myths -- actually, as a colleague quipped to me, the memo would have been much more accurate if the "myth" and "fact" headers had been reversed.

Take the first section, which begins with this "myth": "Barack Obama Claims People Have Adopted His Unconditional Timetable for Withdrawal From Iraq." Under "fact," Scheunemann writes:

John McCain, our military commanders and the Iraqi government agree that our troops should come home based upon conditions on the ground -- not the unconditional timetable Barack Obama supports. Unlike Barack Obama, John McCain believes our troops should come home with honor and victory. Barack Obama's support for an unconditional timetable has led to an "open disagreement" with our military commanders. Even Iraqi leaders believe our troops should leave depending upon conditions on the ground. The only one advocating an arbitrary, unconditional timetable is Barack Obama. Everyone but Barack Obama agrees that a withdrawal dictated purely by politics invites chaos and the possibility that our troops would have to return.

Set aside for its pure silliness the implication that Obama wants American troops to come home in dishonor and defeat. There's also the implication that Obama wants to withdraw all troops from Iraq, something that's clearly not true. Nor has Obama advocated an "arbitrary, unconditional" timetable. After laying out his plan for withdrawal in his recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Obama wrote, "In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected." And former Obama advisor Samantha Power has previously made clear that Obama's plan is a "best-case scenario" subject to change based on conditions on the ground.

Then there's Scheunemann's contention that "even Iraqi leaders believe our troops should leave depending upon conditions on the ground." McCain himself says he has heard that in private meetings he has held with Iraqis. But that's certainly not what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said in public statements recently.

The second part of Scheunemann's memo is no better. The "myth" Scheunemann claims to explode is, "Barack Obama Claims the United States Has Adopted His Policy of Unconditional, Presidential-Level Meetings With Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Ahmadinejad makes a great boogeyman for the McCain campaign to exploit. But as I've written in this space before, and as Time's Joe Klein has repeatedly done a superlative job of explaining, there's no real reason to believe that the Iranian leader Obama would meet with would be Ahmadinejad. In May, Klein wrote:

I promised to check into whether Obama had ever said that he would negotiate -- specifically, by name -- with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Indeed, according to the crack Time Magazine research department and the Obama campaign, he never has. He did say that he would negotiate with the Iranian leadership -- but, on matters of foreign policy and Iran's nuclear program, the guy in charge is the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. As of today, John McCain was still accusing Obama of wanting to negotiate with Ahmadinejad. Why doesn't the McCain campaign and other assorted Republicans ever accuse Obama of wanting to negotiate with Khamenei? Well, because Khamenei isn't quite the flagrant anti-Semite Ahmadinejad is.

At this point, just about everyone agrees: It was not a good week for John McCain.

The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller, for example, has an interesting article Friday, a look back at how McCain fared over the past few days. It's not a rosy picture. Bumiller starts off by observing, "Senator John McCain's presidential campaign recovered from a near-death experience almost exactly a year ago, and political candidates stumble in and out of troughs all the time. But it is safe to say that Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is not having a spectacular week."

To bolster her point, she turned to Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist who was working for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee earlier this year. "McCain is having a disastrous week," Rollins said. "It would have been better if he had just kept a low profile and stayed out of the limelight. He got dragged into making a lot of stupid comments about Obama, and there's been this tremendous contrast with the visuals, which is what a lot of people pay attention to."

And though she quotes one aide, Mark Salter, saying he's not worried, Bumiller notes that McCain's camp is well aware of how the week has gone. "Campaign advisers to Mr. McCain say that the mood is not good at headquarters in Arlington, Va., and that the week got off to a bad start when Mr. McCain was photographed in a golf cart with the 84-year-old former President George Bush in the resort town of Kennebunkport, Me.," Bumiller writes. "It was the same day that pictures of Mr. Obama in sleek sunglasses alongside Gen. David H. Petraeus in a helicopter in Iraq were beamed all over the world."

Separately, Politico's Mike Allen asks a very good question: "Do we think that the Republican effort to goad Obama into taking a foreign trip will be written about in textbooks as a GOOD idea?"

And at NBC's First Read blog, in a post written by Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Domenico Montanaro, there's this:

So was this week a turning point in the presidential race? The Obama campaign certainly believes it was, and that this will be the moment that Obama grabs the lead for good. If McCain never catches up at this point, his campaign's actions this week (its blistering criticism of Obama and the media, the visuals it picked, its body language, its VP games) will get second-guessed for months ... Watching McCain chasing the news cycle and his inability to not let Obama get under his skin -- and the campaign's -- suggests that they could be reactive from this day forward. Why, for instance, did the campaign insist on the equal treatment (see network interviews) this week and not simply attempt to create its own week of coverage from the nets? They were second fiddle all week, and seemed to almost demand being highlighted in that way.

I know it's early to declare a quote of the day, but I'm reasonably certain that no one's going to be able to top Andrew Klavan's Op-Ed in today's Wall Street Journal, "What Bush and Batman Have in Common." Klavan writes:

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds ...

Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like ... a "W."

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror -- films like "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted" -- which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe ...

When our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

Perhaps that's when Hollywood conservatives will be able to take off their masks and speak plainly in the light of day.

During the primaries, Terry McAuliffe was one of the people most devoted to Hillary Clinton, and certainly one of those working most doggedly on her behalf. But when he was in Virginia on Tuesday, McAuliffe was talking up someone other than Clinton for vice president.

McAuliffe said "Virginia Governor Tim Kaine would be his party's best choice as Barack Obama's vice presidential running mate," the Falls Church News-Press reported. "McAuliffe was adamant in his recommendation of Kaine as the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee Tuesday, although he stressed to the News-Press after his speech, which included an informal half-hour question and answer period, that the ultimate choice will be Obama's very personal one."

From an Associated Press story about some comments Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) made upon returning from Iraq, to which he traveled with Barack Obama:

"Quit talking about, 'Did the surge work or not work,' or, 'Did you vote for this or support this,'" Hagel said Thursday on a conference call with reporters.

"Get out of that. We're done with that. How are we going to project forward?" the Nebraska senator said. "What are we going to do for the next four years to protect the interest of America and our allies and restructure a new order in the world. ... That's what America needs to hear from these two candidates. And that's where I am."

Remember when the right was complaining about the fact that Barack Obama's overseas trip was getting more coverage than John McCain's three recent overseas ventures had? Well, now the rhetoric has shifted, and the McCain campaign is slamming Obama for going abroad at all. In an interview he gave to NBC, McCain specifically questioned Obama's decision to give a speech in Berlin.

"I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering anyplace outside of the country after I am president of the United States," McCain said during the interview, which will air Thursday night. "But that's a judgment that Sen. Obama and the American people will make."

Considering those three supposedly undercovered trips McCain went on, think there might be some hypocrisy at work? You bet. As NBC's Mark Murray pointed out, "On June 20, McCain himself gave a speech in Canada -- to the Economic Club of Canada -- in which he applauded NAFTA's successes. An implicit message behind that speech was that Obama had been critical of the trade accord. Also, McCain's trip to Canada was paid for by the campaign."