One of the stranger ironies the Constitution has bestowed on American politics is this: some 50 million people just finished choosing the parties’ two nominees in a grueling, yearlong primary campaign that cost millions of dollars and captivated the world. But when it comes to picking vice-presidential nominees, only two people on the planet get a vote: John McCain and Barack Obama. Between an explosion of democracy in the spring and an even bigger explosion of self-determination in the fall is a brief interlude of, well, something that Vladimir Putin could probably live with.
