Condiment.(The Talk of the Town)(Condoleezza Rice for vice president post)

Last Tuesday night, after Vermont, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas gave John S. McCain the delegates he needed to clinch his party's Presidential nomination, good-fellowship reigned--among Republicans, that is. "Senator McCain has run an honorable campaign, because he's an honorable man," McCain's last serious intraparty rival said. McCain returned the compliment: "I want to commend, again, my friend Governor Mike Huckabee." McCain does not always use the word "friend" in a friendly spirit; this time, though, he sounded perfectly amiable. The celestial choirs were a little more muffled the next day, in the White House Rose Garden. President Bush, offering the nominee-elect his (somewhat superfluous) endorsement, referred to McCain as "my friend" and himself as "your friend." McCain, for his part, abjured the "f" word. He did say that he looked forward to their campaigning together, "in keeping with the President's heavy schedule." In the eight minutes that remained of the ceremony, the candidate contrived to mention the President's schedule four more times, always stressing how very busy it must be.

Despite the manifold signs of a perfect Democratic storm this year, McCain is in an enviable position. He can get some sleep. He can raise some money. He can watch with interest as Hillary Clinton spends her millions trying to dismember Barack Obama and Obama spends his trying to keep his limbs attached. Meanwhile, he can continue to tack between the two ideological and stylistic identities that have got him where he is today--the rebel and the regular, the Rooseveltian (Theodore) and the Reaganite, the "maverick" and the "conservative"--without veering so far to one side that he forfeits the advantages of the other.

Over the years, McCain has performed this delicate task with some success, pairing up positions like Noah bringing animals aboard the ark. He plumped for lobbying reform but has lobbyists running his campaign. He opposed enacting Bush's tax cuts for the rich but supports extending them indefinitely. He supported a "patients' bill of rights" but refuses to treat health care as itself a right. He voted against banning same-sex marriage in the Constitution but favors banning it state by state. He once disdained the likes of the Reverend Jerry Falwell (who blamed AIDS on God's alleged hatred of a "society that tolerates homosexuals") but now embraces the likes of Pastor John Hagee (who called the Roman Catholic Church "the great whore"). He was for starting the Iraq war but against the way it was being fought; now he's for the way it's being fought but against discussing whether it should have been started. There is at least one question, however, to which two answers won't do.

"WITH MCCAIN ATOP TICKET, TALK SHIFTS TO SPOT NO. 2," the Times headlined the day after Spot No. 1 was definitively filled. According to the accompanying story, McCain has no Vice-Presidential short list and no process for making one, "merely a process to find a process." Nevertheless, the paper assembled a list of its own, based, one assumes, partly on conversations with persons in the know. At the top: Governors Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota; Charlie Crist, of Florida; Jon Huntsman, Jr., of Utah; and Mark Sanford, of South Carolina. The "mentioned as well" category included three former governors: Tom Ridge, of Pennsylvania, and two of McCain's vanquished primary opponents, Mitt Romney, of Massachusetts, and Huckabee, of Arkansas.

What shines through this list of names is the banality of the calculations behind it. All are off-the-shelf conservatives, ranging from the socially mild (Crist) to the fiscally rabid (Sanford, who labels himself "a right-wing nut"). All are white males. All, as governors or ex-governors, compensate for McCain's dearth of administrative ...