Charlie_Brennan's Blog

Barack Obama is trying the patience of even some of his most fervent supporters, by stretching the wait for his announcement of a vice presidential running mate out to the last possible minute.

The question is, why the delay?

This announcement, this being 2008, is attended by the high-tech gimmickry of a promised text message first, to all supporters who signed up on the Obama campaign web site to get word ahead of the media and the pundits and the party insiders.

Except, it's not a gimmick, and that may well lay at the foundation of why all the seeming foot-dragging.

You see, the whole purpose of the text-message notification plan was for the Obama campaign to collect as many supporters' cell phones as possible, for later use in the campaign. Anyone who thinks the Veep text will be the last cell-phone contact they get from the Obama campaign between now and Nov. 4 has not been paying attention.

I'm always proud to tout my own genius - on the rare occasions it surfaces. I cannot claim this theory as my own, however - but when I heard it, I recognized its wisdom in an instant. This comes from political scribe David Montero, at my former place of employment, the Rocky Mountain News.

Here's the way he laid it out.

The longer the wait goes on, the more the anticipation builds. And the more the anticipation builds, the more potential Obama voters across the country, surely, are still logging on to the Web site and submitting their cell phone numbers. The greater the wait, the more substantial the supporter database that is being compiled by the Obama team.

Montero doesn't claim his theory is fact, and we won't know, in the immediate near future he's simply just thinking about this too hard - something he's been known to do (and I say that respectfully).

Another thought out there is that the Obama folks have accumulated so many numbers that the sheer act of rolling out all these text notifications will take hours - and that has built a logistical challenge into the process that is affecting their overall clock.

So there's something to chew upon, other than your nails, as you're waiting to hear who the next John Edwards or Dan Quayle might possibly be.