Columnist Bruni had nothing to say!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2012

His contract required him to say it: At this point in the campaign cycle, the children kill time in a time-honored way.

The children kill time pretending to guess who the VP selection will be.

In the past, it has been proven: If the children are willing to wait, presidential nominees will tell them who the VP selection is.

No deal! The children have columns to fill and hours to kill—and they have few ideas. For that reason, we’re handed piddle every four years about possible VP selections.

The children guess who will be picked. Last evening, Chris Matthews burned a segment this way, helped by two national pundits.

This morning, Frank Bruni extends the scope of this time-honored bit of time-killing. The gentleman burns his New York Times column guessing about something else:

BRUNI (8/7/12): The giddy excitement of Convention Season is here.

The Republicans go first, in Tampa, while the Democrats follow a week later, and just as humidly, in Charlotte. In the matter of convention sites, neither party gave much thought to global warming.

But the lineups of speakers: that’s an issue of the utmost deliberation and sometimes consternation and enormous, epic consequence. All party stalwarts agree on that, until they think about it a bit longer and realize that, well, they’re really not so sure.

On Monday I talked to two prominent Republican strategists in a row who said that Mitt Romney’s choice of keynote speaker, not yet determined, was essential. Then they tried to recall who that essential choice from the 2008 Republican convention was, and came up blank.

Who will the keynote speaker be? When a pundit is totally out of ideas, he may even turn to this topic.

In fairness, note the brilliance of Bruni’s approach. He snarks at how pointless the keynote choice is. He soon admits that he can’t even remember who the last keynoter was!

Having noted this suggestive fact, he burns an entire column musing about the next keynoter.

You may recall our definition of “national pundit:” Someone with nothing whatever to say—and a contractual obligation to say it.

Previously burned: Bruni completes a hat trick today.

On April 3, he burned a column guessing about Romney’s VP selection.

On July 29, he burned yet another column guessing who the White House nominees will be in 2016 and beyond. He noted how dumb it was when a polling firm asked about this topic—and then, he used the dumb idea to burn one more column away.