The running-mate question

I want to show you something I wrote 12 years ago. George W. Bush was the presumptive Republican nominee, and everyone was dying to know who his running mate would be. One hot prospect was due to give a speech in Washington, and so, on a hot July morning, I went to check him out. It was bedlam. Scores of gawkers seemed juiced by the notion that the man in their midst might wind up a heartbeat away. The winner of the veep contest, I wrote, “might well be the slim guy with the silver hair and sharp tongue who sauntered into a marble lobby and waved hello to 100 of his new best friends.”