Jack Reed and the Midnight Plane To Denver

A few hours from now, I'll wrestle all these computers and cameras and boarding passes and cocktail party invitations and first-aid kits and barely acceptable convention clothes into a single suitcase that converts into a backpack, in case terrorists or space monsters attack Denver or Saint Paul and I need to escape on foot.

But instead of a nice dinner and some basic quiet human time away from politics tonight, before this two-week information war begins, I'm hunched over the laptop, typing wild conjecture about how maybe Jack Reed, the senior senator from Rhode Island, is Barack Obama's pick for vice president.

Reed is on none of the Top Pick lists, even though the Wall Street Journal described him as an ideal running mate for Obama, just last month. I'm hearing rumors of sudden Secret Service protection around Jack Reed's house. Evan Bayh and Tim Kaine are officially out of the game.

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I don't know enough about Jack Reed, but what I do know is boring yet solid -- and that's probably exactly what Hopey Obama needs to calm the undecideds and independents who believe, bizarrely, that John McCain getting shot down in Vietnam forty years ago gives him some unique ability to run the executive branch of the United States. Crashing doesn't even count as a win in NASCAR.

Anyway, Jack Reed: He grew up in a normal, not-rich Rhode Island home -- his dad was a high-school janitor. Jack made it to West Point, by being smart and having good grades. He became an Army Ranger, served with honor, and eventually became a professor at West Point before getting his law degree and becoming a Rhode Island state legislator. Most people probably never noticed him until he took that last trip to Afghanistan and Iraq with Hagel and Obama.

There are no obvious scandals like affairs, drug addiction or serial killing in the Reed biography. Maybe the TXT message will arrive in a few hours and Jack Reed will be on the ticket. Or maybe it will be something crazy, a text message announcing a joint co-vice presidency of, say, Mike Bloomberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Michael Phelps and Merle Haggard. Nobody knows, everyone is going insane. This is no way to rest up before the Democratic Convention in Denver.

I am taking amoxicillin every four hours, because the roving disease vectors in my house known as "toddlers" have infected me with a terrible plague called Strep Throat. This is exactly what you want to catch before flying to Denver and renting a house and covering the DNC and Obama's stadium acceptance and then driving for two days to St. Paul, because that seemed like a fun idea at the time, and checking into a couple of suites at a business traveler hotel about four cities away from the convention site, and covering McCain's coronation and the Ron Paul sports arena show and a million protesters and then flying back to California, and probably infecting several hundred thousand people along the way, causing the exact apocalypse we know and love from that Stephen King book.

This will be a wonderful convention, both of them. If you're going, maybe we'll get a drink or six somewhere along the way. If not, be thankful you can watch safely on the teevee, or ignore it altogether. Some people love the conventions, and see them as massive trade shows of drunken fun and networking. But I have covered enough of these things to treat them as War Zones.

Ken Layne will be covering the Denver and Saint Paul conventions for AOL Political Machine and Wonkette, if he lives that long.


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