VICE SQUADS.(The Talk of the Town)

Goodness, that was exciting, wasn't it? We have a nominee! Two of them, in fact: a Democrat, John Kerry, and a Republican, George W. Bush. And it didn't take all that long--not even eight weeks from the eve of the Iowa caucuses, when Howard Dean was on the cover of Time as the all but inevitable Democratic standard-bearer, till March 3rd, the day after Super Tuesday, when Senator Kerry's last serious rival, John Edwards, dropped out. Of course, the candidates and their entourages had been at it longer, anywhere from a couple of years to a lifetime. But for normal people the Presidential semifinal round was short, stimulating, and (to the extent possible in a political era as fraught with dread and loathing as this one) fun.

All right, what happens now? What happens now is a general-election campaign that lasts eight months. No one would plan it that way, and no one did. America's outlandish method of picking Presidents is the product of haphazard historical accretions, two-hundred-plus-year-old constitutional compromises, ever-shifting political improvisations, shortsighted partisan schemings, and interstate jostlings for influence. (Thanks to that last factor, the date of the New Hampshire primary has migrated from the second Tuesday in March to the fourth Tuesday in January.) Fortunately for the stability and sanity of the planet, there is nothing like it anywhere else.

By contrast, our system of picking Vice-Presidents is simplicity itself. The Presidential candidate, once his own nomination is in the bag, picks a name. That's it. The role of the rest of us is to speculate. And this year, given that the Democratic Convention is still four months down the road, Vice-Presidential speculation looks like being an invaluable time-filler. Anybody can play this game. So let's get started: Who's it going to be? Edwards? Dick Gephardt? Bill Richardson? Bob Graham? Wesley Clark? If your guess is on that list, then your guess is as good as anybody's, including the insiders': those were the top five names in National Journal's pre-Super Tuesday "Democratic Insiders Poll." National Journal, a Washington weekly, is so inside that a subscription costs seventeen hundred dollars a year. The insiders it polled, some fifty of them, are so inside that their names are unfamiliar even to obsessive readers of political news. (Can you identify Tammy Baldwin, Eric Eve, Bob Slagle, and Mike Veon? Then you're an insider yourself.) By the time of last week's Insiders Poll, Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa, had displaced Clark. Bubbling under the top five were Senators Evan Bayh, of Indiana, Bill Nelson, of Florida, and John Breaux, of Louisiana. And, farther down, Hillary Clinton, of New York.

The job is no longer a joke, which is what it was for most of American history. "My country," complained its first occupant, John Adams, "has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." A century or so later, Woodrow Wilson chimed in, "The chief embarrassment in describing it is that in saying how little there is to be said about it one has evidently said all that there is to say." In "Of Thee I Sing," the 1931 Broadway hit musical by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and George and Ira Gershwin, the Vice-Presidential character is played for laughs. The party bosses who nominate him can't remember his name (though it's close ...