. . . my foreign policy expertise is exactly what our nation wants in someone who would be just a heartbeat from the Presidency.

Writing - General

Craig was inspired to write this letter to Senator McCain after the latter announced his 2008 Vice-Presidential nominee. He never received a reply.

Dear Senator McCain

I realize that you're not much of an internet user so you might find it surprising to learn that bookies are actually taking odds that somehow Governor Palin will find herself out of the VP nominee position sometime between now and November 4th. While I certainly don't believe everything I read on Yahoo.com, in the unlikely event that you wind up without a VP prospect on the ballot, and realizing that you may not even have a weekend in which to find a replacement, I thought I'd save you some possible anxiety and suggest a suitable alternative.

Me.

That's right, me, Craig Arthur Kelley of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I know what you're thinking, that it's a bit presumptuous of me to suggest adding myself to your ticket. I'm also pretty sure that your vetting process, however abbreviated it might be, would turn up the facts that not only am a registered Democrat and a City Councilor in one of America's most liberal cities, but that I maxed out my donations to Mr. Obama's campaign a few weeks ago. I admit those might be speed bumps on our road to the White House, but you're well known as a man who likes to toss out political surprises and, taken as a whole and served with the proper spin, I would be the perfect compliment to your campaign.

Let's look at the facts. Only a year older than Ms. Palin, I'm young enough to counter your senior status while claiming almost a term and a half as a City Councilor for governing experience. Enough to season me, but not enough to make me one of the Washington Insider Elites that the GOP needs to run against. I'm not even a Cambridge Insider Elite yet. And while I haven't had command of anyone's National Guard, my four and a half years in the Marine Corps should adequately burnish my national security credentials. Of course, I never heard a shot fired in anger and the only injuries I sustained were self-inflicted (remember, if you ever wind up parachuting out of a plane again, keep your feet and knees together until you're safely on the ground), but I can truthfully boast that I helped win the Cold War and with me in uniform no one dared mess with the good ol' US of A. Let NPR try to twist that record around. My family's history of battlefield valor is much deeper than just me, of course, with my Grandfather having helped defeat the Japanese in the Big One and both of my parents having been bombed by the Axis powers in that same war: my dad by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and my mom by the Germans during the infamous Blitz. I'm not sure how close the shrapnel actually came to them, but I'm sure we can figure something out that's suitably exciting.

On a similar note, my foreign policy expertise is exactly what our nation wants in someone who would be just a heartbeat from the Presidency. My wife and I, and our two boys, have vacationed in places ranging from France to New Zealand and I speak English like a native. Further, I dated a Columbian girl while in college and my sister-in-law is Peruvian. Even my mom's a foreigner, having grown up in Switzerland. Truth be told, I'm the perfect example of someone living America's melting pot promise. I'm sure we can work my family's international history into a good immigration reform commercial that'll play well in the swing states.

Closer to home, I'm everything you're looking for in a wingman. I admit I'm not as strongly anti-choice as many of your forced-birth backers might like, but my wife and I have two kids so it's clear that we don't believe in mandatory abortions. That should be enough to keep the folks at Operation Rescue happy. As for the NRA crowd, I've got to be honest, I give annually to the Brady Handgun control folks. Still, I was a Marine (did I mention that yet?), and I used to shoot guns a lot. I even go hunting with my dad every year so I'm sure we can find a fairly recent photo of me holding a gun near some dead animal. Opposition research might point at the facts that I'm a vegetarian, that the only deer I ever shot I didn't kill and that the only time I ever killed a deer was when I hit one with my truck but I think we could handily dismiss those arguments as smears by bitter, disenchanted taxidermists and move on.

Talking of trucks brings me to the next stop in the vetting process. I drive a Honda I bought used 10 years ago. I know, just about everyone drives a Honda or a Toyota these days, unless they own their own refinery, but I understand that my current choice of vehicles may cost us in the Rust Belt. My suggestion is that we splash around a lot of pictures of my first two vehicles, both of which were American-made trucks (okay, the Ford F-150 was made in Canada, but they're almost the same as us, aren't they). I've even got pictures of my Ford, with huge tires, a roll bar and a gun rack, buried in the California mud near the 29 Palms Marine base (have I said that I was a Marine?). Those pictures, and one of me this summer using a 4-wheeler for the first time, should score big points with the "Wise Use" crowd we'll need to hold Idaho and Utah. We'll gloss over the fact that, with 180-plus thousand miles on it, my Honda has proven to be much more dependable than my trucks ever were.

Speaking of Utah, that touches on another important subject for our ticket: religion. It won't take anyone long to find out that I'm about as WASPish as they come, but we can skim over that and focus on the fact that I teach Sunday School at Christ Church Cambridge. Yup, that's the same church where Teddy Roosevelt taught Sunday School back when the Republican Party actually stood for something useful, so we'll want to focus on how I'm following in the footsteps of one of the GOP's greatest sons and ignore my church's pro-gay rights stance. If the discussion does get into the mud about gay rights, I think I'll be able to say "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" in a properly righteous fashion and then take the next question.

The next question may well be climate change. On that issue, I've got you covered. With a car that gets in the 30s for mileage and a fleet of bikes in the garage that take me and my family around Cambridge, I'm the perfect compliment to your "drill, drill, drill" plank. My Sierra Club history and impulsive purchases of all those neat gadgets with the wind-up battery recharger will have the environmental lobby too confused to vote. There's even a windmill by the highway just south of Boston next to which I could have a couple of photo ops taken to shore up our energy reform base.

Naturally, my list of qualifications don't stop here, but this has been a long letter and I don't want to take up too much of your time at this stage in our campaign. Should you want to discuss my candidacy in greater detail, I'm sure we could find an hour or two for a conference call to settle the final details of our ticket.

Looking forward to a great '09.

Sincerely,

Craig A. Kelley

PS- In deference to your computer skills, I'll drop a hard copy of this letter in tomorrow's mail.