(A week from today) –Sen. Barack Obama felt decidedly odd. Besides an overall queasiness, the morning meetings seemed to move in slow motion. “Once more,” he asked, “what’s up on finding my running mate?”
The young woman with the clipboard answered. “For the selection panel you chose Caroline Kennedy because she’s a Kennedy, building your new image of playing touch football, growing that pompadour, wearing khakis and spending weekends on PT Boats. Also, being a Kennedy, she could be water-boarded by Dick Cheney and still die rather than support that hideous Clinton woman.”
“Perfect,” said the candidate, smiling faintly. “And we’ve got Eric Holder, our campaign legal eagle and former deputy attorney general. You’re sure he had nothing to do with murdering those whacko people?”
“The place was Waco, the people were whacko,” she corrected. “He has a perfect alibi, on vacation for that whole month.”
“Noted,” said the senator. “But the mortgage baron turned out to be – how shall I say this? Subprime?”
“Quite,” she replied. “Jim Johnson. Resigned. Up to his neck in cronies, and as CEO of Fannie Mae at least partly to blame for the mortgage mess.”
“And hence the impending collapse of the global economy,” he mused. “Plus he picked running mates for those losers, Mondale and Kerry — if he was a travel agent, he could have found us the last two tickets on the Titanic. Tell me, just how do we select people for panels to select people?”
“We’re looking into that,” she said sourly. “Meanwhile, we have a plan. The process needs to be transparent, while giving the ultimate winner a chance to boost his own public support.”
“I thought they’d just scribble some names and we’d chat,” said the candidate.
“Too last millennium,” said the staffer. “In fact, it doesn’t matter who your running mate is – what counts is process, not personnel.”
The candidate furrowed his brow, tilted his head, crossed his arms, crossed his legs, and otherwise turned off his body language.
“We’ve run this by Howard Dean and everybody. It’s, like, ultra rad,” she said enthusiastically. “We make a shortlist of ten potential running mates, then we put them all together in a house and – wait for this – videocast them in every room, 24 hours a day. We watch them interact. Every week, viewers phone in to kick one out until the convention, when the winner is left. Reality television!”
Senator Obama’s eyes widened even further: “Are you people crazy?”
“Like a fox,” she answered. “First we thought, like, tape it in a jungle where they’d have to kill their own food, but Howard thought that was too dangerous. Then, this was my idea, we’d put them in a really nasty slum and watch them interact with hoodlums and thugs. But the Secret Service vetoed that: too many candidates would be raped and stabbed. So we’ll tape it in a typical middle class American home, say 6,500 square feet like your place in Chicago. With a modest indoor pool, in a really average gated community…”
The senator turned apoplectic: “Of all the counterproductive, mentally defective, hallucinatory, imbecilic…” But he felt himself being shaken by his wife.
“Barack,” said Michelle. “Barack, honey, you’re having that dream again.”
“What a nightmare,” said the candidate, unknotting himself from his bedclothes. “What was that inedible glop they fed us at the fundraiser tonight?”
“It’s called barbeque, baby. Poor people like it. Now take an antacid and go back to sleep.”
S.J. Masty is a former Washington, DC, speechwriter now based in London as an international communication adviser.
