There's powerful pressure to yoke President Obama with a Vice President whose primary qualification is fitting the electoral calculus of the Same Old Politics.
Most of the names on the various lists we’ve seen, even at dKos, follow this conventional thinking: balance the ticket demographically or geographically, add some additional military credibility or foreign policy experience, unite the party, placate a disappointed also-ran and his/her fans, yadda, yadda, yadda.
The main motive for each of these considerations is the shortest of short-term political aims, lasting only a few days more than two months, from convention-end on August 28 to the morning after the election, November 5. The short-term aim: to balance the ticket in order to improve the likelihood of electing Barack Obama President. For the subsequent eight years, these matters of balance barely matter.
(It is good for an administration to have breadth of experience, but it's the cabinet, more than the President and Vice President alone, where the breadth and balance must exist. Recruiting cabinet members from the best and the brightest in their respective areas is imperative.)
Ticket-balancing is a piece of the Same Old Politics, and it is de-energizing, uninspiring. The now well-proven political energy of the Obama candidacy is not the Same Old Politics; it’s the stuff that gets folks to say "Wow!" and to gain hope, and to recover a sense of the dignity and competence that’s possible in our public life.
The Vice Presidential nominee should be someone who could step into the Presidency, of course. But it's not automatic that it should be someone who wants the Presidency, either a disappointed 2008 candidate or an heir-apparent for 2016. It should go without saying that the Vice President should be neither a shadow president [cough /cheney/] nor a mere placeholder [cough /quayle/].
Barack Obama should bring to the ticket the one who will work best with him in an administration that must work triple-time to lead the nation’s recovery from the systematic damage inflicted over the past eight years. Not a sycophant; Lincoln's "Team of Rivals" might be a model with great energy.
Instead of asking for the Same Old Politics' logical choice, the Obama campaign should ask things like, "When the next Vice President first joins Barack on stage, whose appearance can make the crowd go wild with delight?" "Who will make folks watching from home say ‘Wow. That makes sense!’?" "What choice will knock the pundits' socks off?" "What choice will get Keith and Rachel arguing?" "Whose name after Obama’s on a campaign button will create buzz in grocery lines from Berkeley to Oklahoma City to Miami?"
I'm not saying I know who this best choice is. I'm saying this is who Barack and his team should be looking for. And they’re not going to find him or her by looking at any of the conventional wisdom lists, not even those on Daily Kos. This nominee may not be on anybody’s radar yet. This one’s probably not even sitting by the phone hoping for the call, and will be as surprised when the call comes as the rest of us will be when the announcement is made.