TPMCafé habitués, supporters of Clinton and Obama and Edwards and Gravel, my fellow Americans. I come to you today without prognoses and without predictions. I will leave it to others to deliberate what Barack Obama’s recent primary victories might mean; I will leave to Josh the momentous matters of Texas and Ohio, Michigan and Florida, superdelegates and campaign shakeups, and I will leave to Todd the overwhelming question of whether the good old boys at MSNBC have this poster adorning their studio walls.

For I come to you today with a very simple proposition: if Barack Obama is going to win the Presidency and unite America, he needs to start signalling that he's willing to choose me as his running mate.

Now, it’s true that a handful of bloggers of uncommon courage and foresight were discussing this option as long ago as 2005 (scroll down to comment 24). But now the stakes are very high and very real, and I think it’s time to take me seriously as a candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States.

What do I bring to the Obama ticket, you ask? Well, first, of course, the promise of unity. When I announced my own bid for the presidency on this site two weeks ago, I wrote:

in 2008, my friends, I solemnly pledge to you that I will unite . . . me!

Until now I have been a deconstructive tissue of différance. But today I say to you, what America needs is a new anti-poststructuralist humanism, a fresh commitment to a Unified Subject. And that subject is me!

Happily, this is precisely what the Obama campaign’s internal polling shows: the American people are sick and tired of Foucauldian gridlock. They want someone who can bring us together, one discursively-constructed subject position at a time. And in this campaign, I can lead by example!

But more important, my presence on the ticket helps Obama in the two areas where he needs help most urgently:

Charisma. Understandably, some longtime Democratic observers have become uneasy about Obama’s supporters. Bringing together a volatile mix of limousine liberals, Kool-Aid guzzlers, jejune twentysomethings, and middle-aged university professors, Obamamania has startled pundits and party regulars and pundits alike. “His rallies are less like political gatherings and more like cult events, complete with chants and initiation rites,” said one completely impartial observer recently. “I worry about stadiums full of people who are moved to vote in free elections and to register other people to vote with them,” said another source, who was absolutely not a concern troll. “The whiff of what some senior media analysts call ‘liberal fascism’ is not difficult to discern.”

Well, I completely sympathize with these dyspeptic skeptics. It is indeed unsettling for the party of John Kerry and Walter Mondale (good men both!) to consider having a publicly compelling standardbearer who can appeal to voters’ hearts, minds, and souls instead of patiently and laboriously explaining to the American people that the current debt/GDP ratio cannot be sustained as a percentage of the national debenture amortization-and-reallocation rate unless we elect someone committed to competence rather than ideology. I, too, long for the Golden Age of Dukakis, when Democrats would not dream of stooping to such insipid campaign tactics as “inspiration.” And that is why, as an utterly unknown and uncharismatic vice-presidential candidate, I will dampen irrational Democratic exuberance wherever I go! Which brings me to . . .

Balance. While Obama speaks to tens of thousands of Americans of the historic gains of the antislavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement, I will speak to twenty or thirty English and Comparative Literature professors and graduate students about the differences between Stuart Hall’s neo-Gramscian idea of hegemony and Noam Chomsky’s account of “manufacturing consent.” Those differences are indeed significant, and they turn largely on the question of whether one is willing to avail oneself of the idea of “false consciousness” as an explanation for why people whom you believe should make common cause with you are failing to do so. (It also involves the question of how one conceives of conflicts within the state apparatus itself, as Nicos Poulantzas suggested in State, Power, Socialism and Political Power and Social Classes.) I could go a bit further, and point out that my running mate was right to suggest that Reagan’s presidency sought and achieved a degree of political hegemony in the United States (in precisely the terms Hall devised for his groundbreaking analyses of Thatcherism) whereas Bill Clinton’s, for a variety of reasons both practical and ideological, did not. But the important point is that while Obama speaks to millions of Americans passionately and movingly, I will speak to dozens of American academics drily and droningly. The Obama/ Bérubé ticket will thereby achieve “affective balance,” which, my personal research shows, is far more important in this era of Instant Messaging and YouTube than cosmetic forms of “balance” based on geography, demography, or ideology. In other words, Obama will provide the electricity and I will provide the thick rubber insulation, thereby mollifying Paul Krugman and reassuring nervous Democratic Party regulars everywhere that this frothy, insubstantial “inspiration” thing will not get out of hand.

Obama/ Bérubé: let’s not get too excited, everyone!