So, um... Bloomberg for McCain's VP slot?

Well, Obama didn't listen to me. Maybe McCain will.

By November the US election will be about the economy. Several more huge financial institutions will have gone under, been sold for monkey-nuts, or bailed out by the Fed. The housing market will not have recovered. The credit crunch will not have ended. No domestic US business will be expanding, investing, or hiring. (Bar bankruptcy specialists. And Wal-Mart, as the middle classes go downmarket). No one will care about the foreign policy credentials of Obama's running mate.

McCain has admitted he knows nothing about economics. So pick Bloomberg, he won New York as a Republican for God's sake...

Of course, he won't.

Writers shouldn't have opinions about anything, least of all politics, so I won't express a preference in this race. I like both McCain and Obama a great deal, as human beings. They are both remarkable, in their very different ways. But, from a satirist's point of view, I think a McCain presidency has more going for it. I would dearly love to see an economics novice, in his seventies, who can't even remember how many houses he owns, dealing with the worst economic crisis, and housing market meltdown, in US history. McCain said it best, in the Wall Street Journal in November 2005: “I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

And if he gets to be President in November 2008, boy will he be educated.

As the Wall Street Journal said of him (at the end of that same in-depth interview on his economic policies):

"I come away believing that if I'm ever in a knife fight or in a foxhole, there is no one I'd rather have next to me than John McCain. Whether he's someone who should be steering the rudders of the American economy is a different issue altogether."