The vice presidential guessing game has reached fever pitch, with many betting Barack Obama is going to make his pick known this week, before the Olympics start. But I'd like to suggest another appointment for Obama to announce, which he should do before he selects his running mate. Obama should announce that, if elected, he will offer the job of special envoy to the Middle East to former president Bill Clinton.

This could reap many rewards for Obama, and for the Clintons as well. First of all, it would be impossible to find someone better qualified and better suited to be America's face in the region. Bill Clinton would likely be acceptible to both the Palestinians and Israelis, which goes a long way toward moving the peace process along from the very start. Clinton could oversee the entire region, and try to put Bush's Humpty-Dumpty foreign policy mess back together again. Not being an ambassador to any one county, but rather having a portfolio of the whole Middle East, would give him a regional focus on one of the most important (if not the most important) regions of the world for the near future. Clinton could sit down with Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and all the other countries who have a stake in what happens in Iraq, and address their concerns in a fair-handed way. While achieving total peace in the Middle East may be an unrealistic goal in four years (or even eight), achieving stability in the region is indeed possible. It would take a master statesman to do it, but luckily we have one of those available -- Bill Clinton.

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I have a confession to make. I actually watch the network news. Maybe I should enter into a twelve-step program or something.

But I don't watch the news for fun, and I certainly don't watch it for, you know... news... since it has largely become a substance-free zone. But I do watch it because I want to see what pap is being fed to America each and every night by the giant corporations that pre-package it and serve it up to us all.

I do, however, draw the line at cable news, since the dent in my living room wall from my forehead is already deep enough. To say nothing of the dent in my forehead. Ahem.

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Republicans think they've discovered the way to beat Democrats in this year's election, with a strategy that can be summed up as: drilling for votes. Democrats, confident that logic is on their side in the oil drilling debate, may be ignoring this at their peril. It is too early to tell, of course, but the Democrats need to come up with a way to frame the debate to their advantage fast, or else they risk appearing as if they have no idea what to do about high gas prices.

I've said before that the price of gas is intimately tied to how Americans see whoever is in charge in Washington. Presidential approval ratings track very closely with the price of gasoline. This is not a new phenomenon. But Bush isn't running for re-election, so John McCain is free to say whatever he wants on the subject. Which he has increasingly been doing.

Democrats seem confident that they're polling ahead on most other issues, and have not been giving this the attention it deserves. But elections sometimes hinge on a single issue, and Democrats are on the wrong side of the polls on this one. Sure, it's nice that Barack Obama has both a better plan for foreign policy and a better take on most domestic issues that voters care about. But rebutting "let's drill now" (the Republican talking point making inroads with average Americans) is tough to do. It takes facts, and long-winded explanations. And that doesn't always work in a campaign.

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Barack Obama made a campaign promise to visit the state of Alaska before the election. And what better time than right now to follow through on this promise? Obama should fly to Alaska the first chance his campaign schedule allows and make a speech at a rally with Mark Begich (and any other Democratic candidates for Alaskan office who care to join in). Begich is currently the Mayor of Anchorage, and is running to unseat the Republican Senator Ted Stevens. You may have heard Ted Stevens' name in the news recently. Which is why the time is now for Obama to make the trip.

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Today we look at Barack Obama's vice presidential picks, by popular demand. I have so far resisted jumping into the VP fray, mostly because I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said by dozens of others. I can't pretend I can see inside Senator Obama's mind better than anyone else, and to my way of thinking the whole silly-season exercise of trying to guess who it will be is a lot of sound and fury, which ends up signifying nothing. But I've been noticing one facet of the choice hasn't really been adequately addressed: the consequences of such a pick.

Now, I'm not talking about consequences to Obama's chance of winning -- there's been more than enough of that sort of thing already, whether you want to slice it by geography or demographics, or whatever. Instead, I'd like to talk about the vacancy left behind.

Because many on the list are currently holding public office. Meaning if they get the VP nod, they're going to leave behind an empty office for someone else to hold. And the consequences of what happens to that office is what I'd like to focus on.

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Sixty years ago, on July 26, 1948, President Harry S Truman singlehandedly desegregated the United States military.

While that statement is true, it does not tell the whole story, since nothing is quite that easy. The military resisted fiercely, and it took years to actually achieve full racial integration of the military. It wasn't until March 18, 1951 that the Defense Department announced that all basic training had been integrated, much less the entire armed forces (which took even longer). The Truman Library has a very nice timeline of desegregation in the military for those interested in all the details.

But although it was a long, hard struggle to get the military to accept equal treatment for African Americans, Truman's Executive Order 9981 was undoubtedly the start of the official process. Sixty years ago, Truman signed his name to the following:

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Be careful what you wish for, John.

That seems to be the message of the week for Senator John McCain. He took some campaign consultant's idea a few weeks ago and tried to make political hay out of it -- put a running "clock" up on his website to show how long it had been since Barack Obama had been to Iraq.

It was a sophomoric trick, but then what do you really expect from a Republican campaign consultant?

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Since this week seems to be "Numbers Week" here at CW.com, I'd like to take a very close look at two recent polls, because they show something astonishing which everyone appears to be either ignoring or missing: When pollsters ask about four candidates instead of two, Obama's lead goes up. When Bob Barr and Ralph Nader are added into the mix, they seem to both draw votes mostly away from McCain, widening the gap between McCain and Obama.

This seems strange, since the conventional wisdom would have it that Barr will draw voters away from McCain (he's already being spoken of as a "spoiler" for McCain in one particular state -- Georgia -- where Barr hails from); and that Nader will draw voters from Obama. But, as these two polls show, that doesn't seem to be the case.

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I had the chance recently to interview two professors in the field of statistics (from Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who have jointly come up with an interesting plan for replacing the Electoral College. Their plan would retain the electoral advantages small states currently have, but would remove the winner-take-all system we have now.

Arnold Barnett (George Eastman Professor of Management Science at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management), and Edward Kaplan (William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Engineering at the Yale School of Management) originally published their scheme in the American Statistical Association's magazine Chance (20:6-9, 2007) under the title "A Cure for the Electoral College?" Their paper is only four pages long and is worth reading for those interested in the wonkier realms of American political theory. [You can download it at Chance magazine's website (click on "A Cure for the Electoral College?") or download it directly as a PDF file.]

Being statisticians, of course, the paper does have some math in it; but even if you skip over that and read the rest, you'll get a quick overview of the Weighted Vote Share (WVS) system they propose. In essence, their plan would come very close to a national popular vote, but at the same time the WVS system would retain the advantage small states now enjoy in the Electoral College.

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I had a dream last night, but it didn't really end well. I dreamed I got unprecedented access to Barack Obama and his family, and got to go home with them for an evening in order to do an extended interview. But it turned into a "went to school without my pants" nightmare, because I couldn't think of a single thing to ask them.

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