Proper care and feeding

Oh, I do enjoy Gail Collins on a sunny Saturday morning. Her latest gift to political discourse is this memorable analogy:

picking a running mate is — no disrespect intended — like picking a pet. How much time are you planning to spend with the little fellow? How much exercise will he be getting on an average day? On one extreme, you have the William Wheeler model (“There’s the living room. Go find a corner and sleep in it.”) On the other end, there’s the Cheney version in which the pet takes over the checkbook, diversifies the family investment portfolio and starts strafing at the neighbor’s cat.

Of course, flip is not always fair:

And then there was Charles Dawes, Calvin Coolidge’s veep, who wrote the melody to the song “It’s All in the Game” and got a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on stabilizing the German economy after World War I.

Yes, I know. That last one didn’t work out too well. The song is nice, though.

Stabilizing the German economy after the post-WW1 hyperinflation was a tremendous achievement, whoever deserves the credit. It was the Depression that kicked the continent back into crisis.