Bill Shipp Online

John McCain is hosting a barbecue this Memorial Day weekend with potential Vice Presidential choices, including Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Surprisingly, Georgia's Sonny Perdue is missing from the list. An intrepid reader sent along the following quiz, entitled "Where is Sonny?"

1. China
2. Bonaire
3. Oakey Woods
4. Renewing his vet license for 2010
5. Watering the grass at the Governor's Mansion (oops, isn't that illegal?)
6. Mediating stress reduction classes between Casey Cagle and Glenn Richardson
7. Writing a romance novel about the Georgia DOT
8. (submit your own answer)

The winner will receive a prize from Bill Shipp Online, but only if Sonny receives the prize of Vice President.

By Bill Shipp (please also see a roundup of Hamilton Jordan articles and stories)

I’ve spent at least half my career playing “What might have been?”

News of Hamilton Jordan’s death Tuesday night made playing that perennial pundit’s game easy.

Hamilton was the smartest political consultant I ever knew. He also might have been the wisest of elected officials, if he could have conquered his persistent health problems and escaped the shadow of being a Jimmy Carter guy.

Hamilton did everything he could to beat cancer.

But he never once tried to disavow his Carter badge – as many other Southern Democrats did – to improve his chances of winning his 1986 Senate election.

Next to being a really smart southerner (the New York– Washington media just couldn’t fathom such a person), Hamilton was a 100 percent loyalist. Turning his back on governor-then-president Carter was not in his playbook.

The Clinton and Obama campaigns have trimmed their delegate lists to exactly the number of available slots.  The lists, emailed to state committee members of the Democratic Party of Georgia, are available on Blog for Democracy.  The chance to become a delegate to the national convention has been a prime motivator for participation in state and local Democratic politics, and in years past delegate selections at the state level (for at-large slots) were raucous affairs that attracted a large crowd of state committee members (who get to do the selection) with many of those members, or friends and family, running.  This year, the party is resorting to free lunch offers in a bid to get 40% of the committee to attend, a requirement needed to then coronate, er, elect, the pre-determined slates for each candidate.  Some committee members, complaining that their role is more reminiscent of an election in the old Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, may try to organize a walkout to deny the party, and the campaigns, the quorum necessary to move forward with the process.