Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, August 22nd, 2008.

I'm David Plotz in Washington.

I'm here with special guest Terry Samuel, Deputy Editor of The Root, our colleagues down the hall.

Welcome, Terry.

Thanks for having me.

And joining us from Maine or perhaps already on the way to Denver is Slate's

chief political correspondent John Dickerson.

John, are you, you're not yet in Denver, I take it.

I'm in Maine leaning towards the door as I get ready to go to Denver.

Are you packed?

Well, I've been working out a bit recently, but I wouldn't say I'd fit that description.

I am, yes, packed, ready to go, and it's going to be a long two weeks.

So today we're going to talk about three subjects.

We're not going to have the disastrous freeform gab fest of the sort we had last week. We're going to have three topics. We're going to talk about three subjects. We're not going to have the disastrous freeform gab fest of the sort we had last week.

We're going to have three topics.

We're going to talk first about the presidential campaign about Obama and the upcoming convention.

And then we will talk about the chaos in Georgia and sort of the brewing conflict between the U.S. and Russia over these missile defense

and over the conflict in Georgia. We'll talk briefly about the Olympics and we'll have cocktail

chatter. And I should say just by way of excuse, we're taping this before Barack Obama

has made his vice presidential, his choice of running mate, which we expect to come soon, but we don't know when. So forgive us for either talking in a way that makes it seems like we don't know it or for ignoring the subject, because we don't know it. And anything we say would be just, you know, if we start talking about how, you know, Tim Cain, what a, we expect him to be the nominee, and then it turns out to be Jack Reed, well, we'll have egg on her face.

Right.

And we could be the only three journalists in America who aren't speculating about

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