I would hope for a McCain/Thompson ticket*, and then hope that Thompson actually gets a chance to do something (even for someone like McCain, I can't bring myself to hoping he dies in office). But I won't vote in this poll, either, because of the enormous difference between "I hope" and "I think." The Republican Party is so screwed up right now that there is no telling what they'll come up with. I think there is an actual chance that they would come up something like McCain/Lieberman. That would be a clear way of saying: "We are not running as Republicans and we don't expect Republicans to vote for us." Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. Instead of just losing (what McCain is likely to do against Clinton and sure to do against Obama), they would get demolished in a landslide of historic proportions. That would split the Republican party apart, which couldn't hurt. Having one bad party was bad enough. Now we have two, about equally bad, and the only hope for the future is massive change in one of them. * Actually, that's nice entirely true. If it has to be McCain, I could dream about having Ron Paul as VP, and him actually getting to do something. But I stayed in the realm of "possible" because a McCain/Paul ticket goes over the line into "wishful thinking" territory.
What about Huckabee? I know many criticize McCain for not being *conservative* enough...Huck could hep balance him out on some peoples eyes.
^ It is not going to be easy to convince me to vote for McCain. Not easy at all. But if he has Huckabee as running mate, the difficulty of convincing me to vote for McCain become total impossibility. Huckabee is unacceptable, period. I still think the best option is to vote Ron Paul. As a third-party candidate if he's on the ballot; as a write-in if he isn't.
I fully expect Paul to run third party. He's taken in an awful lot of money in the primary season without spending much of it at all. If I had to hazard a guess I'd say that the entire point of Paul's Republican run was to raise his profile and make raising money for a third party or independent run in the general election easier. Short of fraud it's hard to think of what else he might have planned, and while I'm as far from a Paul fan as they come I'm certainly not willing to ascribe fraud to him as a motivation. As for Republican ticket possibilities, I think Mirror Universe McCain is the most likely of the given choices behind "other." Adding Huck or Lieberman to the ticket would completely kill McCain's chances of winning the election. Tommy Thompson might be possible, but Fred isn't. Fred didn't appear to want to run for President in the first place even though he had a better chance of winning had he given it an effort than any other Republican in the field. There's no chance that he runs for Veep.
If Ron Paul isn't on the ballot in November then I'll probably vote for the democrat out of frustration/despair.
Thompson was approached early on about being VP to balance McCain, Giuliani, or Romney, since all three are lacking in conservative cred... Initially, his campaign was a trial balloon to see what kind of acceptance he'd have...and given the relative success he had with his campaign, the Thompson VP slot may be a done deal already.
Huckabee's in his own world. And if he truly believed he had the VP slot, he'd have dropped on Tuesday like Romney did.
McCain/Huck? Nope. McCain will leave him weeping like a little girl. Internally, Republicans know that the same people that hate McCain hate Huckabee, and they also know that the southern States Huckabee supposedly brings to the ticket, McCain will win anyway in a race against Obama or Hillary. McCain/Thompson? No. I like Fred but no GOP strategist worth the title is going to be down with the "Grumpy Old men" ticket. Leiberman? Possible, but you usually don't recycle past VP candidates. The buzz I hear is that McCain will be very likely to go with his national campaign co-chair - Tim Pawaltny of Minnesota. Despite his recent shift to the left (particularly on global warming), he enjoys a good reputation nationally among Republicans who know who he is, and he's from a region of the country that's in play. In my opinion, if he's smart, he will get someone that the hard-core conservatives are in love with, and who is young enough that he can be the face of conservatism for the next generation. Ideally, that's J.C. Watts. but if Obama wins the nomination, it will be derided as tokenism for McCain to take a black running mate. However, if Hillary wins, after all the bad blood she and Bill created with black voters, it would be the perfect time to pick him. Sanford is a good white alternative to Watts if Obama is the opponent. Bobby Jindal would be good but he needs to build up his resume in Louisiana for a few more years yet. Lindsey Graham, like Huckabee, has been sucking McCain's dick for a long time trying to get it but he, too, will be denied. Ultimately, I think the best odds far and away are for Pawaltny (which means I'll have to learn how to spell his name!)
