OK, I’m going to take a stab at making the case that John McCain will defy the whole “stay out the Bushes” conventional wisdom and pick Jeb Bush over frontrunning option Mike Huckabee as the vice presidential nominee. My argument leads from the assumption that the Bush family still has a lot of power in Republican circles, that they want to repair their family name, and that they see McCain as probably losing anyway and so want to set the table for the Big Jeb Family Comeback. First, the McCain-Bush détente, which famously began with a Caribou Coffee klatch between John Weaver and Karl Rove back in 2004, is sufficient to have yielded benefits to McCain in states like South Carolina and, more recently, with the endorsement of former President George H.W. Bush. So, McCain knows on which side his bread is buttered, and since he’s already saddled with Bush legacies on the war and the tax cuts, he may as well go whole hog and be literally paired with a Bush legacy running mate. Second, because the Republicans are still going to need to have an inside track in either Florida or Ohio if they have any chance of winning, and because Charlie Crist, the current Republican governor, is unlikely to be chosen for a variety of reasons we won’t delve into here, and given what happened in Ohio in 2006 and the fact that the Democrats now have Gov. Ted Strickland there (and thus no more Ken Blackwells for the GOP), the smarter play is Florida. And Jeb provides ample help there. Third, McCain is aiming for a more inclusive GOP coalition that includes Hispanics, and would like to get his national number close to if not equal to the 40 percent Bush drew in 2004. That’s gonna be hard enough, but made somewhat easier with Jebbie on board, because he speaks fluent Spanish, has a Mexican-born wife, and has street cred with Hispanics. Fourth, the Bush family and its circle of donors can produce a lot of money for such a ticket and, given the amazing disparities between what the Democrats are raising right now and what McCain, who went practically bankrupt last summer, has collected, McCain may need access to the spigot. Finally, and purely from the Bush family’s self-interested angle, the damage to the Bush brand is so bad that having the more articulate, smarter Jeb on the national stage certainly can’t make things worse and probably would make things better. If McCain can win, the Bushes are back in line for the next Republican opportunity, in 2016. If not, Jeb moves up even faster, to the head of the queue in 2012. --Tom Schaller