As noted in the staff post earlier today, there are rumors that John McCain’s about ready to pull the trigger on his running-mate choice, maybe as early as this week. But as Noam Scheiber of TNR points out, the “window” for Barack Obama’s veep decision is closing too, since there will be only ten days between his return from his overseas trip and the beginning of the media-and-audience-sapping Olympic Games, which will last until the day before the Democratic Convention.
In other words, we will probably know both tickets within the next two weeks, and maybe earlier.
In that connection, HuffPo had a good catch today when it noted, buried in a short, two-day-old New York Times piece, the news that Hillary Clinton was indeed being vetted for the running-mate position, despite recent indications to the contrary.
Nobody knows if that means anything, but it’s interesting that the intense veep speculation of the last couple of months has largely abated precisely at the time when it’s actually appropriate. The earlier talk has, of course, previewed a lot of the likely reaction to this or that choice in this or that party. But the deals are about to go down, and there’s not a lot of confident betting about the results on either ticket. Anticipatory leaks can be expected any time now, but until then, it remains a bit of a dual mystery.