Pat Toomey lists a bunch of potential good vice presidential picks for John McCain: Mark Sanford, Jim DeMint, Mike Pence, Steve Forbes, and Phil Gramm.  Of all of them, my vote would be for Gramm.  Jay Nordlinger had a great piece about Gramm on his retirement from the Senate [emphasis mine]:

If that Clinton domestic agenda was indeed thwarted, one of the reasons was that Gramm stood—early and immovable—against nationalized health care. He said, famously, that it would pass “over my cold, dead political body.” It was his adamancy that stiffened Republican spines, that kept the temporizers and defeatists from trying to split the difference. Gramm remarked that only two people in Washington had read the entire health-care bill, himself and Hillary Clinton: “She loved it, I hated it.”

As a presidential candidate, Gramm seemed a good thing: a self-made man, an articulate one, certainly a driven one. He didn’t go in for what was later called “compassionate conservatism,” because conservatism—just plain conservatism, freedom—was compassionate, dammit, and why didn’t more people understand that? And he was tired of being lectured to about poverty and hardship by people who had never known any.

Gramm, though, went nowhere. He raised a lot of money, but not a lot of supporters. What went wrong? “I was a poor candidate. I did a bad job. There’s no one to blame but myself.” What’s more, “America was never going to elect me unless there was a crisis. And people didn’t see a crisis in 1996. I was the wrong person at the wrong time. And there may never have been a right time for me.”

I think it’s the right time for Gramm.

Posted by Hubbard in Conservatism, Audacity of Hype