Why is the Condi-for-VP rumor being floated?

1. It's a slow week, and everybody's looking for page views.

2. It helps offset the story about Romney getting booed at the NAACP convention, which conveyed the vague message that Romney has nothing to offer black people. What if he had Condi? That puts everything in a different light. Suddenly, he's not — what the hell did Rush Limbaugh call him? — "Snow White with testicles."

3. It's not much fun dragging out the veepstakes over the prospect that it's going to be Rob Portman, but it could be Tim Pawlenty. Quite aside from the white-with-testicles problem, it's just so predictable and dull. We need to be tantalized first, and nobody's more tantalizing than Condoleezza Rice. Except Sarah Palin. But Romney's too white-bread to tantalize us with Sarah. It's "white-bread" to go with the black lady? Yes! She's very solid and serious. She's gravitas personified.

4. Send the Obama campaign into a tizzy. Make them spend time and money preparing to push back Condi. Will they have to worry that she's more authentically black — American black — than Barack Obama? How will that debate about race be framed? Complicated. Here's something Rice said to the Republican National Convention in 2000: "My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did." What will the Obama people do if that sort of thing is thrown in their face? Let them worry about it.

5. Somebody trying to make money on Intrade?