Dani, glad to see you're a fellow Bill Bradley fan. I had a two-foot-high stack of undistributed Bradley For President bumperstickers languishing in my basement, ready to be recycled in some future election year, until they were carried away in the Katrina floodwaters.

If he had won the Democratic nomination back in 2000, maybe we would have been spared the compounded idiocy of the last 8 years.

Well, the experts said Bill was not a charismatic enough speaker to win the Presidency, and they were probably correct. Just being smarter than anyone else in politics, and highly conscientious, isn't enough to get elected.

Maybe Dollar Bill, rather than any of the current candidiates in the primaries, will be the right guy to be installed as Obama's running mate; Barack has enough oratorical skills for two people, and Bradley has the long experience and the "policy wonk" aptitiude that might be seen as deficient at the top of the ticket.

Certainly, there is no one in the country with a better understanding of the IRS and of realistic strategies for reforming our tax system than former Senator Bradley. In recent years, whenever a new administration is about to take over, there is always talk of giving the new VP some special project (because the job itself doesn't really require very many specific duties). A Vice-President Bradley could do an awful lot to improve Federal tax and financial policies.

Bill probably still has a better jump shot than the average politician, too, although I'm sure his knees are shot by now, and he's no longer able to move without the ball as brilliantly as he used to.