I was coming up on a slowing State Patrol deputy with his lights flashing. I stayed back as he reduced his speed (Yes, I was late, but I figured it would be bad form to rocket my ’92 Honda Accord past him at 80 MPH and obscenely gesticulate at him for having the temerity to slow me down. They tend to frown on such behavior). I let my car slow down and courteously moved to the left lane as he pulled to the right to tend to an accident that was being sorted out on the shoulder. I continued to slow down to around 30 MPH as the other traffic also moved left. It was a little curious why traffic was very nearly crawling to a standstill for what appeared to be a minor fender-bender. Or so I thought until I attempted the brakes for the first time and kept going into the back of a 1993 GMC 350 pickup. It was freezing rain, for which the National Weather Service saw fit to declare a warning two minutes after my accident. Next came nearly falling ass over teakettle on the ice getting out of my car, getting yelled at by the driver whose truck I’d just hit (before he got out and nearly fell ass over teakettle on the ice), and all hell breaking loose around us as tires skidded, metal crunched, and cars piled up behind me.

So never let it be said that I wouldn’t almost give my life for this blog.

It would have been natural to write that accident off to my being late and to the unexpected vagaries of the weather in the Columbia River Gorge in January, but I recently found myself in a similar situation, even though my automotive travails of late should have sufficiently chastened me into driving 15 miles below the speed limit with a bicyle helmet on and putting on my signal a half-mile before I intend to make my lane change or left-hand turn.

At that point I had to think back and wonder what it was that would provoke me to put my pristine car and unblemished driving record at risk by driving far too fast and recklessly yelling profanities from behind the wheel to anyone and no one in particular (with my window safely rolled up, of course, lest anyone should actually hear me; I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid), and compared what led up to the accident I was actually in and the repeat performance that I was tempting. Then I made the connection: It was Howard Wolfson on the radio.

It all made perfect sense. There are only two people whose voices I could inadvertently hear behind the wheel who could make me put my car and my life into harm’s way out of blinding anger and irate, helpless rage (bear in mind that I would never be so foolhardy as to do my opposition research by listening to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, or Michael Savage behind the wheel; that kind of behavior makes you a higher risk, and they will actually raise your premiums if you are in an accident and they discover a right-wing AM station in your presets. Seriously.): One is George W. Bush, and the other is Hillary Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson.

On the day I had my accident, Wolfson had just sent out a press release lowering campaign expectations for that day’s Democratic primary in South Carolina, but lambasting the “efforts by the Obama campaign to ignore Floridians”, and that “their voices will be heard loud and clear across the country, as the last state to vote before Super Tuesday on February 5th.”

“You disingenuous weasel douchebag”, I thought, moments before I’d crash my precious and otherwise durable and dependable Honda car. The campaign signed the damned stupid pledge last year to honor the DNC’s potentially suicidal decision not to seat Florida and Michigan’s delegates if they dared to move their primaries up ahead of Super Tuesday’s contests, yet you’re campaigning for a victory that you’re going to claim anyway, just like you did in Michigan when everyone else except Dennis Kucinich pulled their names off the ballot.

As the Clinton campaign has gotten dirtier, Howard Wolfson has been seen increasingly front and center, lobbing Hillary-sanctioned mudpies and, when necessary, just as quickly denying that he’s done so.

It was Wolfson who launched the plagiarism charge against Barack Obama, after he used in a speech a line that Massachusetts Governor (and close friend and National Campaign Co-Chair) Deval Patrick had used during his gubernatorial campaign in 2006.

It was Wolfson who, after Obama promised to more aggressively fight Hillary in the wake of her March 4 wins in Ohio and Rhode Island, and a split decision in the Texas prima-caucus, compared the Illinois Senator to Whitewater Special Prosecutor Ken Starr (and why in God’s name would the Clinton campaign even want to go there? It was a colossal waste of money, but enough dirt came out on the President to make that an experience you wouldn’t be wont to pull out the scrapbook and fondly recall. “Hey, you guys remember my attempted murder acquittal back in the day? Boy, that was a time, wasn’t it? Good thing we pled that down to aggravated battery!”).

It was Wolfson who almost made me get in another accident when he declared this past Saturday in a Bill Press Show rerun that Hillary beat Obama fair and square in Michigan and Florida, and that it wasn’t unreasonable that all of Michigan’s delegates and most of Florida’s delegates should go to Hillary (“No one told the candidates not to campaign in those states…Senator Obama pulled his name off the Michigan ballot because he knew he couldn’t win.”).

It was Wolfson who suggested that Obama could be an acceptable Vice Presidential choice for Hillary, if he passed an undetermined “national security threshold” before the convention, but after the superdelegates stepped up and selected Hillary as Presidential nominee. Of course, this was one of the main talking points when they did their cynical fly-by in the Obama country of Mississippi.

It goes on day after day. I understand that spokespersons are generally rotten people anyway, just by the nature of their jobs. They are the well-paid, assigned flak-catchers of the campaign, and while the positions they parrot from the podium may not necessarily reflect their own, they are handsomely compensated to allocute them passionately. Howard Wolfson does his job very well, to the point that I’m not sure where Hillary ends and he begins, and as the campaign gets filthier, we can only hope that the only other car wreck he instigates it that of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and not that of the Democratic party. And God knows I don’t need another one.

But that’s another story. Although, back when he was a McGovern Democrat, he taught me the single-best lesson I ever learned in bi-partisan bonhomie with his maxim, “Just because I’m a Democrat and you’re a Republican doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. So, I’ll hug your elephant, and you can kiss my ass!”

In short, even though I was one of the first to salivate over a McCain 2000 candidacy in 1998 when I discovered his middle-of-the-road positions on several issues and heard his delightful stories on Imus In The Morning (“Senator Goldwater once said to me, ‘John, if I’d beaten LBJ in ’64, you wouldn’t have had to spend all that time in that Vietnamese prison camp.’ I said, ‘You’re right, Senator. It would have been a Chinese prison camp.’”), there won’t be a McCain bumpersticker on whatever car I’m driving in November.

Every now and then, though, comes a Republican I don’t mind so much. Of course, the gold standard is Oregon’s late and beloved Governor Tom McCall. He pioneered land-use legislation, championied the nation’s first bottle bill; said of the state’s first urban high-rise, “This is very nice. Let’s not do it again,” and welcomed out-of-state visitors to come to his beautiful state, spend their money, “but please don’t stay.” If John McCain has Republicans like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham ready to bolt the party, if Tom McCall were alive and happened to become the party’s standard bearer, they’d be dousing the whole house in gasoline and dropping a lit Zippo in their wake.

I like Chuck Hagel, the Senator from Nebraska. I’ve got mostly nothing but good-feeling for that neo-Libertarian nutpouch, Ron Paul. Governors Charlie Crist and Bobby Jindal could very well wind up sharing the ticket with John McCain, and I wouldn’t have a problem with them. But I can take them or leave them.

Then there’s Ed Rollins. I really like old Ed, and I always have, even when he was working tirelessly to elect Ronald Reagan to a second term. In his 40+ years in American politics, Ed has been the quintessential gun-for-hire, but never a whore. He’s truly believed in every candidate he’s ever supported, even if he comes to regret it sooner or later. He’s had magnificent triumphs and cringe-inducing embarrassments. Unabashedly profane, no stranger to bottles of scotch, and long known as one of the worst-dressed men in Washington, forget George W. Bush–this is the guy you could sit down and have a beer (or, more likely, ten) with. He grew up a boxer and street-fighter in industrial California, and reading his autobiography, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, you get the sense of a bygone era in American politics–when it was all about bloody mano a mano pounding and a handshake afterwards.

He was a party man and loyal, but rarely to a fault. He once offended the sensibilities of Republican Iowa Senator Roger Jepsen, during a White House push for an AWACS sale to Saudi Arabia in 1981. They had to twist several arms to get the deal done, including Jepsen’s. When asked during a course he was teaching how they turned Jepsen, Rollins mentioned offhand, “We beat his brains in.” Unfortunately, the questioner turned out to be a reporter for the Des Moines Register, and Jepsen was outraged when the comments came out. Rollins was very nearly fired by the White House, which needed all the friends it could get in Congress. He was woodshedded and ordered to go make peace with Jepsen.

Jepsen would have none of it, though, and played the man scorned card to the hilt. Rollins finally snapped, “Senator, if you want my ass, you’ll get it. But…if I’m fired, I’ll find a candidate to run against you in the primary and I’m going to beat your motherfucking ass right into the ground. You’ve never had someone like me running campaigns in Iowa. I’ll bomb your ass back to the Stone Age.” That was the end of Jepsen’s bluster.

His first week in Washington D.C. working for Ronald Reagan, he became a grudging mentor of young Lee Atwater, who had stormed into the Capital as a skinny young kid ready to start putting notches in his belt. “Who the hell is this kid?, I thought. I figure Billy the Kid’s victims must have thought the same thing before he shot them down in cold blood.” Atwater was his deputy for the next several years, and Rollins was always suspcious that a knife could be jammed between his shoulder blades at any second.

He rarely copped to being intimidated by anyone. Except one person: First Lady Nancy Reagan. Rollins’ rough edges and rumpled appearance immediately aroused suspicion in Mrs. Reagan, who put a premium on Beverly Hills elegance in all of the President’s inner circle. Rollins knew all too well that if anyone could hand him his head, it was the First Lady. Once, when he was on the Presidential helicopter as it landed at the Reagan Ranch, the Reagan dogs mobbed Nancy a bit too enthusiastically, and knocked her ass over teakettle on the ground, raising her dress up over her shoulders. “In the seconds I had to make a decision, I knew there were only two choices. I could run over, solicitiously pick her up, and pull her dress down with as much aplomb as I could muster–and the First Lady would know forevermore that I’d seen her petticoats. Or, I could quickly climb back onto the helicopter and pretend I hadn’t seen anything. It was a no-brainer. I scurried back up the steps and hid inside the chopper while ranch hands and Secret Service agents dusted her off.”

The Reagan Years were the high-water mark of Rollins’ career as a political strategist. He backed Jack Kemp in 1988, and then made one of the most head-scratching political decisions of his life when he teamed with former Jimmy Carter Chief of Staff, Hamilton Jordan, to run H. Ross Perot’s campaign in 1992. He made another decision he would regret in 1994, running Michael Huffington’s failed campaign against Dianne Feinstein for the U.S. Senate seat in California, before leaving them to the ruins of their own making and joining George Nethercutt’s successful bid to unseat House Speaker Tom Foley in Washington state. He’s retired several times, but like any old pol, can’t stay out of the game for long.

He resurfaced again in 2008 working for the Presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee. “He’s praying for me, and I’ll help him brawl” (Huckabee responded, “He is! And I’m teaching him how to turn the other cheek!”)

“I admire the fact that he’s trying to change the environment,” Rollins says of Huckabee. “What I have to do is make sure that my anger with a guy like Romney, whose teeth I want to knock out, doesn’t get in the way of my thought process.” With that comment alone, he gets a thumbs-up from me.

We tend to forget now, but from 1963-81, pursuing the Presidency was a dead-certain way to get your life insurance coverage canceled. John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Bobby Kennedy was shot to death on the campaign trail in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, a furniture salesman died by his own hand in a botched attempt to hijack an airplane and crash it into Richard Nixon’s White House, Gerald Ford had two women try and murder him within three weeks in California in 1975, and a sullen Jodie Foster fan very nearly took Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981. From a risk-assessment standpoint, aspiring or ascending to the Presidency was a vocation as potentially perilous to one’s mortality as working on an Alaskan fishing boat or being Geraldo Rivera’s food taster.

Even among those who didn’t die with their boots on, Lyndon Johnson aged before America’s eyes and died a broken and haunted man almost four years to the day of leaving office, the Happy Warrior Hubert Humphrey briefly considered a fourth run for the White House in 1976 before dying less than two years later with a bladder that resembled a Google Maps photo of industrial New Jersey, Paul Tsongas was dead within five years of almost nabbing the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination, and the man who defeated him, Bill Clinton, came into the White House young, fresh-faced, and vital, only to emerge eight years later Methuselah-white and looking as if he’d just seen Star Jones nude.

Getting there or being there, it’s not an easy job. For those of us who think we have it tough working eight or ten or twelve hours a day in a thankless and grinding work environment where our customers are never satisfied and our associates believe we could impossibly complicate a one-car funeral, we’ve got nothing. We can come home in the evening and pour ourselves an imperial pint of four parts vodka to two parts soda water and watch CSI reruns instead of having the media pepper us for the next two news cycles about how we didn’t cancel a purchase order quickly enough and cost a customer return freight and 25% restocking fees for a $1,216 special equipment order or watch endless footage of our raising a frustrated middle finger to the phone while enduring a six-minute tirade from a nearly-shrieking, menopausal client.

Work is easy. All things Presidential are hard. And, as far as the hunters are concerned, it’s never harder than it is in 2008. The media are relentless, the travel is brutal, you’re constantly begging for money, and every word and gesture is run through a 276-point computer analysis. And everywhere you turn, someone wants to end you, either literally or figuratively.

That’s the kind of grief that would kill an ordinary man or woman.

So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that one of our current presumptives could, God forbid, leave this year’s campaign season in a mahogany box or an urn.

What happens then? Well, it’s fairly obvious on the Democratic side: It solves a lot of problems that we’ve spent the last several weeks about. But God help Hillary if something happens to Barack. There’s already been a whisper campaign for years about her putting a slug in Vince Foster’s head.

For the Republicans, it would be a convention free-for-all, and it would be mayhem. Just when you thought you wouldn’t have Mitt Romney to kick around anymore. Mike Huckabee would be emboldened, thinking he had been bequeathed the miracle he’d been praying for. Giuliani’s ego would be sufficiently recovered by then that he’d be fully capable of the same delusions that made him think he could be President in the first place. It would be the 2003 California Gubernatorial Recall all over again, with every fringe delegation scheming at the convention to get their man to the top of the ticket. You could even have one of those conventions of yore where 30, 35, 40 ballots would pass before the brass ring gets handed to someone who was still at home eight states away when the first ballot was cast.

In short, it would be the only way the GOP convention is going to get any TV viewership this year.

For both parties, it gets a little murkier the closer you get to the election. If the election is too close for the ballots to be changed, it’s very likely that a dead person would win the race. The party would decide the replacement, and the opposing party would dispatch an army of lawyers that could fill a Division 2A college football stadium and tie the election up until the midterms.

The closest we’ve ever come to such a scenario was in 1912 when Vice President James Schoolcraft Sherman died less than a week before the election, and nearly 3 million people voted for his cooling carcass. Of course the question was moot as William Howard Taft lost the election anyway.

If the President-elect drops between election and inauguration, the 20th Amendment says that the Vice President-elect is sworn in on Inauguration Day. Curiously, this amendment was almost immediately put into effect in 1933, just 23 days after its ratification, when clumsy Giuseppe Zangara slipped off his chair and killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, instead of President-Elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was at Cermak’s side.

Of course, I wish all of the candidates nothing but the healthiest and heartiest of tenures, whichever one wins–if for no other reason than we don’t have to see Mitt Romney skulking around again or have to endure another five or ten years of Clinton conspiracy theories. And besides, we’re all going to be very tired of Chris Matthews by then, if we’re not already.