So, Mark Warner kind of really sucked. There's nobody who could have hoped to follow Barack's 2004 barnburner, and anticipation for Hillary has sucked all the air out of the room—but that was a snoozer. I guess it's a good thing no one listens to me...

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow agrees: "Apparently Mark Warner visited us from the future, and in the future there is no Democratic Party." Spot on. Really, really, really really bad.

She also points out that Warner's failure ups the stakes for Hillary significantly. I agree: she absolutely needs to take the hammer to McCain tonight in a big way to regain her credibility with the Obama wing of the party. He's given her an opening by using her in this week's ads—that was a huge tactical error on his part—and now she can move both her die-hard supporters and the debate-at-large towards Obama by hitting McCain tonight and hitting him hard.

It's made-for-TV. It writes itself.

And for what it's worth, I think she will, if only because a nice and fiery anti-McCain speech tonight is just about the only way, in the unlikely event Obama loses, she could ever hope to have the support of someone like me in 2012.

UPDATE 2: Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum agree. Here's Ezra:

For what it's worth, my hunch is Clinton will own the convention. What she needs to do in this speech is so easy and so obvious and will be greeted with such gratitude by the Democratic Party and such rapturous coverage by the media that it's almost inconceivable that she'll pass up the opportunity to be the hero.

Mark Warner, still my top pick for VP, has been named the keynote speaker of the Democratic National Convention, with Ambinder reporting that the Obama team has been thinking much the same way I have about Warner as VP:

The selection of ex-VA Gov. Mark Warner to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention comes on the heels of a secret, last-minute effort to convince Warner to submit his name and record for vice presidential vetting.

Sources close to Warner say that the Virginia Senate candidate was subject to fairly intense pressure by Obama advisers to allow the team of Eric Holder and Caroline Kennedy to open an account and begin their work.

Warner resisted, citing, as he has done publicly, family concerns and his public pledge to Virginians.

So unfortunately it sounds as if those efforts failed.

Meanwhile, the Field is playing "process of elimination" with the remaining likely names, daring (just for a moment) to dream Obama/Gore...

Gore won't be VP. We already knew this, but it's still a shame. As (mostly) happy as I've been with Obamania thus far, there's nonetheless a part of me that still wishes Al had run, won, and then picked Obama for VP. I would have been very happy to place a RE-ELECT GORE sticker on the bumper of our Jetta.

Meanwhile, Mark Ambinder has the list of who apparently is being vetted. Shankar's pick, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, is on the list, but my choice of Mark Warner is conspicuously absent.

We must be getting close to the VP announcement, right? The convention is just a little over a month away. And with Kaine and Webb both seemingly eliminated, I'm laying down my bet on Virginia's Mark Warner.

Obama's people will be opening 20 new field offices in Virginia in the next few weeks, so one way or another it looks like he thinks he can win the state. But Warner makes it a lock—and, I think, the White House too.