Damning with faint praise: "Hey, John, we'd love to have you as VP. You'd make a great one!" There is absolutely no question that Dove (great comic book by the way; we need something for Rove-Bush - you know Bush is merely an evil [okay misguided] cyborg secretly controlled by Rove's mindwaves - but certain technological snafus cause some of Rove's thoughts to come out garbled, like "misunderestimate" etc., and he can't quite master the facial controls - say, "The Puppeteer" and "Dummy" [too easy?]) [Ed.: Yes, and let's try to pick up where left off, shall we?] is the prohibitive favorite to run as VP and certainly shores up Kerry on a number of points.

But, does it advance Edwards' cause any? We all know the plight of the VP - either they're shut into a back room, allowed only to come out for head-of-state funerals, or ... actually, that's it, they're just shut into back rooms. Yes, Poppy was able to come out and snag a term, but that's because Reagan was so loved, and Bush, Sr., unlike Gore, actually allowed his boss to stump for him (clearly the biggest of Gore's many mis-steps). Now, the issue may be that Edwards doesn't have it in him to run for President this year and then run for re-election in the Senate shortly thereafter, and then, again run possibly run for Prez in 2008 (assuming Kerry loses). I could also see him being scared of the Hillary ticket at that point, and he figures that if he can get the VP nod now and actually win, then he can ride it out until Kerry quits, croaks or crumbles, and then have the nomination for the taking. Still, I'd rather be an in-your-face opposition senator with an active campaign base (hell, it will have been working on-and-off for six years) primed to steal the nomination. The VP role is so anticlimactic.