On Friday's Inside Washington on selected PBS stations, Charles Krauthammer floated his curiosity about what would happen if the Republicans chose a new candidate for the fall election if Romney or Santorum couldn't get to the magic delegate number. Mark Shields joked about how it would be unfair to pick to someone who hasn't slogged across the country and then made a fat joke: "Chris Christie, have a little ice cream, and come in."
There goes svelte Shields again. NPR reporter Nina Totenberg promised the elite media would savage a new Republican candidate and pick apart everything "he" has ever done or said (no females are apparently allowed in this exercise):
TOTENBERG: The elite media will then glom onto this person, and everything he has ever done that might be slightly untoward or controversial will come out. [Italics mine, emphasis hers.] And he will never have had this kind of glare on him, and he will make gaffes. You've seen this all through the primary campaign. Everybody's made gaffes. You have to get used to that. You have to grow into the job of being a national candidate. There's no time to do that.
She wasn't buying Krauthammer's thesis that a new choice might be "electric." Experience shows this could well be the case if one considers the savage media reaction to two recent vice-presidential surprise picks: Dan Quayle in 1988 and Sarah Palin in 2008. Both received exactly what Totenberg described.
