One Friday in early April, Dan Senor was on a buffet line with Grover Norquist at a wonky issues conference at Utah's Sundance Resort. It was one of those high-minded gabfests, this one dreamed up by hedge fund billionaire Peter Thiel, in which various experts "dialogue" on everything from global warming to how to use online social networking for political activism. Senor, the husband of CNN anchor Campbell Brown, is a Republican operative turned venture capitalist and neocon foreign policy maven (he was once the White House mouthpiece in Iraq) as well as an on-air analyst for the Fox News Channel. Norquist, president and founder of Americans for Tax Reform, is one of Washington's better-connected and more outrageous lobbyists (he used to feed his pet boa constrictor live rats named after prominent Democratic officeholders).
As Senor ladled a bowl of tomato basil soup and Norquist went for the pasta, the two friends gossiped about which Great American their party's presumptive nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona might choose as his running mate. The usual suspects came up: Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, both McCain pals, were sticking so close to their man in photo ops that they might as well have been members of his security detail. ("I'm always trying to push Joe out of the picture," Graham joked to me weeks later, though his denials of eager interest in the job were about as convincing as those of his fellow South Carolina Republican, Governor Mark Sanford.) Former McCain foil Mitt Romney, the ex-governor of Massachusetts, had already ardently announced his availability for veep, and a group of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's diehard cheerleaders were launching an anti-Romney-for-veep advertising campaign. Up-and-coming governors Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, the latter the nation's youngest and first of Punjabi-Indian descent, were also in the mix, and Florida governor Charlie Crist's perma-tan and silver mane were as ubiquitous on cable television as Flomax commercials.
"Who do you like?" Senor asked Norquist. "Maybe Condi," Norquist answered. Senor was intrigued. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had just paid a highly unusual visit to the Wednesday group, Norquist's weekly right-wing conclave in his downtown D.C. headquarters — a crowd less worried about foreign diplomacy than about gun control and gay marriage. For any Republican harboring national political aspirations, the Wednesday group seal of approval is a prerequisite. "Grover talked about how effective she was," Senor recalled. "It seemed that she was trying to reassure conservatives that they shouldn't worry about her in the event she winds up on the ticket." And just like that, during his roundtable visit 36 hours later on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Senor catapulted Rice into contention — not necessarily as McCain's potential No. 2, but rather as Topic A for the media-political complex. It doesn't matter that Rice and her surrogates, including Fox News's White House refugee Karl Rove, eventually quieted the buzz. The two-week boomlet was political crack — just the fix that the campaign pros and TV bobbleheads were craving.
