Well, I hope Gary’s dead-on right (see below) when he says John Edwards running for Vice President with Barack Obama is a fantasy. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. But this morning didn’t help. My wife turned on Good Morning America and there Edwards was grinning like a Cheshire cat, gushing over Obama, sounding like a man running for something.

It seems, unfortunately, old politicians, unlike old soldiers, do not quietly fade away. Let’s just hope rather than Attorney General, Obama will appoint Edwards Ambassador to Somalia or Bangladesh – then Edwards can roll up his sleeves and go to work fighting poverty somewhere other than primary states.

As for Governor Easley, his penchant for renting Mercedes limousines for $50,000 a week has put Edwards’ penchant for $400 haircuts in perspective. And Gary’s line about Lyndon Johnson stealing votes in Texas is from a great story by Robert Caro: When Johnson ran for Senate in 1948 the first returns showed he’d lost by a handful of votes. Then some ‘corrections’ came in and he’d won. Then his opponent announced the ‘corrections’ were stolen votes. In one South Texas border precinct 842 people had voted during the day – and each name was recorded on the voter roll in black ink. Then, suddenly, at the end of the day, 201 more people voted – only this time the names were recorded in blue ink in a different handwriting. Even stranger, the last 201 voters had, somehow, marched into the polls in alphabetical order to cast their ballots.

Finally, and unrelated to anything else, last night Albert, the pollster called and said, Has it struck you that Karl Rove looks like Jesse Helms?

That, I said, is your imagination.

Then I saw Rove on TV. I’m afraid I’ll never be able to look at him the same way again.

I don’t understand all this flap about Rove not testifying before Congress. Oliver North did it. Nixon gave ‘Executive Privilege’ a bad name during Watergate and Rove’s not helping. If he’s got a good reason, like his testimony will give away some national secret and cripple us in the war on terrorism, he ought to lay it out. But all this wiggling and saying, “I’ll testify but not under oath and not if there’s a transcript” just sounds like he’s saying, I’m standing rock-solid for the principle of Executive Privilege – unless you let me testify without taking an oath and as long as there’s no record of what I said.

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