Robert Novak and CQ Politics are reporting that John McCain may be ready to announce his candidate for VP. This would be the earliest anyone has ever announced their VP, and it seems like a fairly desperate play to me.
Barack Obama is out-raising and out-polling McCain, and his trip overseas is having a huge impact. He's getting great news coverage and blunting criticism about his foreign policy abilities. McCain seems to feel the need to do something to turn the tables, but he must be out of ideas.
In the long run, I wonder how this can benefit McCain. His only goal seems to be to counter the Obama "overseas bump" with a McCain "VP bump". The trouble with that, of course, is that he foregoes the opportunity to get that VP bump later in the campaign, when people are paying attention.
More importantly, it will take more than temporary bumps to move McCain ahead in the polls. If he wants to win this thing, he needs to search for a long-term solution, but his campaign only has the ability to look at the immediate present. It's particularly telling to me that McCain seems caught off-guard by Obama's successful trip. It's not like this was kept a secret, yet McCain had no strategy to counter the headlines Obama has grabbed, leading to the desperation move of revealing his VP choice early.
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