You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here

Let’s say it’s mid-August 2008. You’re a nationally unknown governor from a geographically large, demographically insignificant state. You’re young and chipper, you’re overwhelmingly popular with your constituents, and you have a bright political horizon before you — a dead-lock two-term run as your state’s chief executive, perhaps looking forward to an eventual move to the US Senate or even to the US House as the state’s only representative. Your reputation as a clean-government reformer has been dented somewhat by summertime allegations that you fired a state commissioner after pressuring him to fire someone you didn’t like. But you’ve pledged to cooperate with the investigation, and — let’s be honest — even if you’re found to have abused your office, very few people are likely to hold any of this against you in 2010. Life is good.

Then let’s say you receive a surprising offer to serve as the vice presidential running mate for a very old man with a history of health problems. Fulfilling the role that traditionally suits the vice presidential nominee, you agree to be the campaign’s attack dog; though you lack the information to develop original broadsides against your opponents, you’re competent with a teleprompter and are capable of cracking wise about pit bulls and lipstick and such. You fib mightily about your record as governor; you struggle with your native tongue in media interviews; you participate in a televised debate, using occasionally-complete sentences but treating facts and figures as if they’re foreign objects to be dislodged as quickly as possible from your throat. You wink and smile. Mooseburger, hockey, maverick — drill, baby, drill. And then, as your campaign slips farther behind in the polls, you resort to portraying the other party’s candidate as a terrorist consort and as a scary (cough negro cough) man with alien values and a loathing for the country he seeks to lead.

Let’s say you do all these things while refusing to cooperate with a legislative investigation at home. You allow your running mate to send a squadron of lawyers to manage the state’s executive branch in your absence. You allow them to describe a former commission head as a backstabbing “rogue” who deserved his professional head upon a platter. You allow them to misrepresent the nature of the investigation. You allow them to portray the legislature as a birdfeeder for Obama supporters. You allow your attorney general to conduct a “fact-finding” excursion that resembles witness-tampering. And when the legislature’s report comes out, you brazenly pretend it says something it doesn’t.

You piss off a lot of people.

Given all that, it’s possible that the homecoming will be awkward.