Election 2008: Dead Time

From the outside looking in, this is the dull time in any US Presidential contest. The dead time. The nominees will need millions, if not billions, of dollars to call each other a slag on a national scale, and that money doesn’t just magically appear, you know. They’ll be doing the hard graft – fund-raising chicken dinners, delivering the same stump speech to self-important businessmen and local dignitaries across the US. Both McCain and Obama will be crawling up their potential donors’ arseholes in an attempt to raid the wallets, at the same time as secretly hating those donors with a passion. But from the outside, this fund raising dead time is just repetitive and boring.

And yet, this time in any presidential contest fascinates me. Because you can start to imagine what is happening behind the scenes.

Both sides will now be thinking exactly how they will fight the coming General Election. I imagine Team McCain are thinking about the best strategies to “take the fight to Obama”. I can see John McCain raging at his subordinates, demanding to know why they can’t smear Obama’s Vietnam record. And I can imagine those sub-ordinates explaining in a gentle, calm way that Obama was a toddler during the height of the Vietnam war, and no matter what McCain might think, people still don’t think toddlers should fight at the front line. And then Team Obama will be sat around, no doubt pondering whether they will actually be able to do the unthinkable, and run a presidential campaign without committed to any policies. At all. Ever.

What is even more fun is thinking about all those different politicians from the same parties who have been slating each other through an incredibly cannibalistic primary season making friends again. The BBC carries this story about Obama making friends again with Bill Clinton:

An Obama spokesman said the two had had a "terrific" conversation during a 20-minute telephone call.

Yes, and one can imagine that after that 20 minute phone call both men simultaneously got off the phone and muttered “fuck you very much”. They’re not friends. They hate each other. Any claims that they are friends are about as credible as the Cabinet here in the UK saying they support Gordon Brown – a big old bag of bollocks.

But the reason why they are suddenly friends is the final reason why this is such a fun time for the US Presidential Election. Because, behind the scenes, the negotiations, debates and arguments are happening about who should take the Vice-Presidential roles on the two tickets. No doubt Hillary Clinton is absolutely convinced that she will be the Veep for Obama – hence Bill trying to make friends with Obama again. And I am equally sure that the Obama HQ has regular moments of despair, as the wonder what the hell they are going to do with that “Hillary problem”. Over in the Republican camp, the mentalist Mike Huckabee is probably waiting for the call from McCain to ask him to become Vice-President – after all, in Huckabee’s demented little world, he is God’s own politician. In the meantime, any Republican politician who lives even slightly in the real world is wondering whether they will get the nod from the decrepit McCain. I mean, for the love of fuck, surely McCain won’t choose to run with the man who took a phone call from God at a fucking fund raiser?

These are the interesting times, people, if you picture the unreported conversations going on behind the scenes. I imagine it all as one of the more interesting episodes of The West Wing, albeit with less piety and more swearing. And it won’t last forever. Soon we’ll have the nominating conventions, and then the endless bitching of the actual Presidential campaign.