Opinion: Who’s gonna be the No. 2 for McCain and Obama?

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OK, we’re getting pretty close on the presidential running mate situation.

Barack Obama’s been meeting with his selection people the last couple of days. John McCain’s been thinking about it, though neither one is talking about any names. Except, for unity’s sake, Obama’s got to say Hillary Clinton is on his shortlist even though she’s probably not.

You can’t blame them for not talking. That’s about the only element of mystery left after, what, 19 months of campaigning with three more to go.

Here in midsummer with only 14 Americans actually following the presidential race -- and one of them, Obama, is going on vacation too quite soon -- the only things left to chew over are the pluses and minuses of a whole bunch of folks, two of whom we’ll come to know much better in these 97 stretch days to Nov. 4.

This website is actually run by a whole lot of skilled people you don’t see very much about. And a talented pack of them came together in recent days to construct a special veep package for LATimes.com readers. So you can learn all about the potential candidates in the talking mix at the moment.

It was unveiled today.

The Ticket wants to highly recommend that VP package available here.

And we want to thank Christine Kang, Tenny Tatusian, Diana Swartz and Kate Linthicum for their behind-the-scenes labors (labours, if you’re reading this in Canada or the U.K.).

-- Andrew Malcolm