Okay, so let's accept the obvious; it's Hillary. Hold that thought.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, it could be any number of people; everyone seems to have significant strengths AND weaknesses.

That puts the two candidates, whomever they turn out to be, in a significantly different position when it comes to what a vice president brings to the ticket.

This is important because while the traditional view-- that a veep will deliver some state or region-- is rarely true, there is an intangible, more than the sum of its parts benefit to a savvy choice. Reagan picked Bush Sr. and signaled that the California cowboys weren't coming to scare the Establishment. Clinton picked Gore and grounded his tomcat image with wonkish sobriety. On the other hand, Dukakis picked Bentsen-- and suddenly looked much smaller. Kerry picked Edwards-- and then seemed to send him off to a secure undisclosed location, revealing his insecurity that Edwards would steal the spotlight.

Hillary's in the more common position-- how do I pick someone who doesn't screw me up, as a Bentsen or a Quayle did their bosses? An Obama or Edwards could be too obviously working on their own chances in 2012; she needs someone who can be her loyal servant yet not seem emasculated in the process. And it will do her no good if she's seen as being forced to accept Obama for the good of party unity. Meanwhile, of course, the first President Clinton will be hanging around, like Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story, making the new running mate look like a stuffed shirt. It's hard to think of any choice that doesn't carry peril for her, which is why Bill Richardson is working so hard on demonstrating that he's her safe choice right now.

The Republicans, on the other hand, precisely because they need more from a veep candidate, stand to gain much more. And this is why Fred Thompson's entry into the race is worth noting. Richard Ben-Cramer's What It Takes demonstrated that the first requirement for a presidential candidate is an almost pathological belief that you are essential to the country's future-- that unless you win, all is lost. Yes, even the likes of Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, Mike Gravel and Sam Brownback have apparently believed that, even if no one else did. Does anyone really believe that Fred Thompson believes that about himself? You can almost hear the "Aw, horseshit" in his gravelly drawl.

The rap on him is that he's just an actor (never mind that he was a prosecutor who got into acting playing himself), that he's lazy, that he didn't do all that much in the Senate (compared to who, John Edwards?) All that suggests someone who isn't monomaniacal enough to be president... but it suddenly takes on much less importance if you assume he's running for vice president. An untaxing ceremonial job that lets him make folksy speeches to help his boss... presiding over the Senate he knows and serving as liason there... where do Ah sign up?

And then consider who he'd likely run as vice president with: Rudy Giuliani. Suddenly Thompson's place in the race seems pivotal: the folksy Southerner to Rudy's ethnic fast-talker, the two-prosecutors team, it's a perfect fit that instantly solves many, if not all, of Rudy's problems. (Admittedly, adding Thompson doesn't really make the ticket any less pro-choice.) No pairing is ever perfect but it would be as strong as Clinton-Gore in filling in the top guy's gaps and making the ticket bigger than the two of them alone.

And so we come back to Hillary. What match can Hillary make that compares with the double-prosecutor East-South combo? It could be out there-- the most successful combos seem obvious only in retrospect-- but it's hard to see who it would be right now, and what the relationship would be that Clinton can fill naturally. How she squares this circle will be one of the first great tests of her presidency-- or of her inability to find the magic key to get her there.

The Washington Post recently had a story claiming that Chief Justice John Roberts was the one who put Harriet Miers' name forward as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor, leading to one of Bush's most calamitous PR debacles with his own party:

When Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, expressed concerns about the Miers selection, he was "shouted down" and subsequently muted his objections, Draper writes, while other advisers did not realize the outcry the nomination would cause within the president's conservative political base.

It was John G. Roberts Jr., now the chief justice of the United States, who suggested Miers to Bush as a possible Supreme Court justice, according to the book. Miers, the White House counsel and a Bush loyalist from Texas, did not want the job, but Bush and first lady Laura Bush prevailed on her to accept the nomination, Draper writes.

On its face this seems unlikely, and the backwards way in which the anecdote is told does not give it any more of a feeling of authenticity. Roberts' people have denied it unequivocally, and most commentators have tended to accept that claim for fairly straightforward reasons-- Roberts, already Chief Justice for life by the time Miers' name was put forward, had the least reason of anybody on the planet to need to suck up to "the boss" by sucking up to one of his closest Texas cronies. If anyone could tell Bush whatever he damned well pleased by that point, it was the confirmed chief justice.

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But I can think of one circumstance, which so far as I know no one has floated as a possibility, where John Roberts might honestly have thought that suggesting Harriet Miers was a good idea-- when the alternative was worse.

We know that the Bushes like to reward loyal cronies. John Roberts surely knows it too. And it's certainly not impossible to think that Roberts, seeing that Bush was determined to nominate one of his close aides, suggested Miers-- because working with her for the next 20 or 30 years beat doing so with Alberto Gonzalez.

Slate has a prominent piece tonight entitled The Conservative Argument For Impeaching Bush. No doubt, to make such a case, the online magazine has found a stern, sober patriarch of conservatism, whose conscience impels him to deliver the bad news as Goldwater did to Nixon. So let's skip to the Author's bio-- wait, above it there's a little paragraph of related pieces:

Rebuking the Bush administration isn't a newly discovered pastime for Bruce Fein: He previously attacked Nancy Pelosi for backing down on Congress' impeachment threats, called for Cheney's impeachment, pounced on Bush's overzealous application of executive privilege, and gave Congress recommendations for how to curb the power of the executive branch.

So Bruce Fein, D.C. attorney and liberal activist with an obsession with impeachment and a book to promote, is to deliver us the sermon on "the conservative argument for impeaching Bush." It is hard to think of a more obvious case of incapacity-- The Clinton Case for Chastity, perhaps... The Hitchens Case for Blasphemy Laws...

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And indeed there is little that resembles a conservative argument, or a conservative, in Fein's latest feat of word processing on his subject. The first section is devoted to trying to convince us that impeachment hearings are just no big deal, that heck, the only way you can even find out if you should have them is by dragging the president away from the business he's been elected to do and putting him in the dock for a few months:

In other words, they [opponents of impeachment] say, no inquiry should commence until proof of the president's guilt has been unearthed—proof which would, of course, make the inquiry superfluous! The Watergate investigation that dethroned President Richard M. Nixon would never have been launched under such an Alice in Wonderland standard of proof, because it began with nothing more than two obscure figures, E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, known to have both White House connections and associations with the Watergate burglars.

If you seem to remember some fellows named Woodward and Bernstein having something to do with uncovering Watergate before Congress ever took up the topic, you are correct: Fein's version of Watergate is nonsense. Congress's first significant action was the creation of the Senate Select Committee on the President's Activities-- under Sam Ervin-- in February 1973. By that point, "obscure figure" E. Howard Hunt and the other burglars had already been found guilty; the FBI had already determined that there was a criminal conspiracy inside the Nixon administration, and the Washington Post had already reported this publicly; and Attorney General Mitchell's use of CREEP for covert activities had been reported on as well.

By the time (May 1973) the Senate Judiciary Committee began investigating, John Dean, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman-- three of the most powerful men in America at the time-- had all resigned. The House Judiciary Committee-- where impeachment must begin-- did not begin to consider the possibility until February 1974, after John Dean had testified to Nixon's involvement on national TV, after Agnew's resignation, after court fights over the tapes, after the Saturday Night Massacre and the 18-minute gap and "I am not a crook." Fein's implication that the Watergate investigation began with an impeachment inquiry-- that, in fact, the only way to investigate anything the president does is by firing up the machinery of his removal, rather than through the routine, but often highly effective, investigative power of Congressional committees-- is either stunning ignorance or utter mendacity.

I know which one I suspect.

* * *

For partisans like Fein, there's no reason not to dispense with the business of actually investigating Bush-- as was done for over a year in Nixon's case-- and move straight to impeaching him. But to advocate such a thing, Fein must believe that he has a list of likely charges so serious and certain that they will command the respect of the entire polity in forcing Bush's removal.

So what are Fein's conclusive and, let us not forget, conservative charges? It turns out he's ignoring the fired US attorneys, the Plame case, the reading of My Pet Goat, and putting all his eggs in a single, unitary basket:

FISA makes it a federal felony for the president or vice president to "intentionally engage … in electronic surveillance [to gather foreign intelligence or otherwise] under color of law except as authorized by statute." A companion provision provides that the FISA's procedures are the "exclusive means" for conducting electronic surveillance. After a leak to the New York Times published on Dec. 16, 2005, Bush confessed that in the aftermath of 9/11, he instructed the National Security Agency to flout FISA by targeting Americans for electronic surveillance on his say-so, a spying program styled the "Terrorist Surveillance Program." The president's apparently criminal spying continued until at least January 2007—or for more than five years—when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared that FISA warrants, whose nature remains classified, would replace the TSP. (The attorney general maintained, however, that Bush continued to be crowned with Article II powers to ignore the warrant requirement and to do so secretly whenever he wished.)

That "crowned with Article II powers" is a nice sardonic touch, if the sort of partisan slip that a supposedly objective commentator making the conservative case ought to have resisted. Article II is, you may already have guessed, the one that includes the (extremely vague) language about the war powers of the president, and in every war the president takes a whole bunch of new powers and Congress and the courts whittle them down. (I guess that's why it's the conservative case-- conservatives are supposed to sympathize with limited government. Yeah, but they sympathize with limited Congressional showboating and limited terrorist freedom at least as much.)

Now, given that so much of this surveillance business is classified, we don't entirely know what's going on here. But some of it has to do with the fact that calls are routed through the US even when the humans at either end are in Germany or Syria or Indonesia; some of it may involve things that are not "listening" or "wiretapping" in the conventional sense but data mining; and most inconveniently for Fein, a whole lot of it was just approved again by Congress. But in Rumsfeldian terms, we're in the realm of "known unknowns and unknown unknowns," so if you'd like to see Congress investigate, if you'd like to bring a court case or two, by all means, do so. That's how our system works.

Indeed, there's almost certainly activity here that some court will eventually invalidate-- but the idea that there's a successful political case for booting the president for doing something he's arguing the Constitution let him do, and which Congress has subsequently said he can do, is preposterous.

* * *

But if the Democratic presidential candidates would like to run on how they'd fight the war on terror knowing that the last guy got thrown out, and maybe even prosecuted, for being too aggressive against al-Qaeda and wanting too much information about its activities-- well, Hill, Barack, Johnny, we're all ears.