Vice President Kamala Harris has tapped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.

And so ends the meteoric rise and unspectacular blinking out of Sen. Mark Kelly’s vice presidential star. I’m happy for him.

Let Mark be Mark, a pack mule of a U.S. senator doing the job his way and winning elections. That’s a good life. It’s a lot better than what would have awaited him had he gotten the other kind of call from Harris.

Hey, I was on board. Didn’t make any difference to me. I didn’t have to live the life of a vice presidential candidate, or, for God’s sake, do the damn job.

His name first surfaced in terms of the top of the presidential ticket before President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid. A poll showed he was the Democrat who fared best against former President Donald Trump in a head-to-head race, differentiating himself from a cast of Democrats.

When Biden quit the race on July 21 and threw his support behind Harris, Kelly quickly got named as one of the top tier of possible running mates.

Initially, Democrats fell hard for Kelly’s resume: Navy pilot, astronaut, a loving husband who cared for his wife, former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived a gunshot wound to the head. He’s also a twice-elected senator from a swingy state like Arizona.

He reportedly even got an interview with Harris over the weekend. Good for him.

But get past the C.V. and the vibes around VP Kelly seemed to peter off into, “Meh. Sure. I guess.” At least among the chattering class.

Kelly, as I mentioned previously, is seen as not the best communicator on planet Earth. He’s not camera-hungry. Comms is a practice-makes-perfect thing and Kelly has never really pretended to be a show pony.

It’s like the jet he flew in the Navy. It was an A-6 Intruder, which is a perfectly respectable attack aircraft. It’s a workaday jet that does the job. His twin brother Scott, flew the F-14 Tomcat. A Tomcat is a sexy beast. Maverick flew a Tomcat. There’s a reason “Night of the Intruder” didn’t make its way into popular culture like “Top Gun” did.

Kelly is a workaday senator and that’s fine. That’s great. It’s a capstone on a life well spent.

Harris wanted a brawler on the campaign hustings. She got a 24-year veteran who was a command sergeant major, who’s ready to happily take the fight to Trump and his running mate (a guy who thinks George Washington had no commitment to the country because he never sired kids).

If Kelly were eager for that kind of fight, he had every chance to prove he could do it. Instead, he stayed largely off the air through the selection process. Walz auditioned everywhere, with his avuncular style winning support across the Democratic Party. He is credited with beginning the trend of loudly calling MAGA Republicans “weird,” which is a more dismissive way of discussing Trump as dangerous threat to America’s free way of life.

Walz has made for great television. He seems to enjoy it. Kelly tends to come off like he’s getting an oral exam. “List five soft powers the president enjoys that are not explicitly enumerated! Twenty seconds! Go!”

So he is on the outside of the presidential campaign, watching it on TV like the rest of us.

I’ll tell you this much, gentle readers. Arizona’s junior senator had a better Tuesday than had he been chosen. He gets to kick back, crack open a beer on the patio, hang out with Gabby and thank the maker that he’s won’t spend the next four years as the second principal negotiating fisheries treaties.

He also gets avoid the incoming Walz is taking for “not being Josh Shapiro.” Everyone on TV just knew Harris’s pick would be the Pennsylvania governor.

All the smart people – who are well known to be in the know, about what’s worth knowing – seem to think Shaprio was the only choice worth making. He delivers Pennsylvania and punches hippies with his pro-Israel take on the war in Gaza, right?

Any other pick isn’t the pick Chuck Todd would have made, so is, do the math, unacceptable. Hippies have been left unpunched. Walz? Walz! Why not just poke a prickly pear in the eyes of Real America?

Real Americans live in trailers, wear big belt buckles and eat at diners. Real Americans don’t drink craft beer and they don’t live in cities. Got that Tucson? You are not real America.

(Don’t tell me how many craft breweries there are in this town. That’s not the issue here.)

That’s what would have awaited Kelly. He’s not Shapiro, without the progressive love that awaited Walz. So he would have been Not Shapiro and Not Walz.

It’s the life of a moderate. Kelly’s get-tough-on-the-border stance comes off as half a loaf because it can be cast as anti-migrant but falls short of Trump’s xenophobic maximalism. Moderation comes with no credit and no love, only shrugs of satisfaction.

Could Kelly have proven himself? Who
the hell knows and who the hell cares. He no longer has to worry about
it.

Kelly gets to hang out in Arizona. While the summer is still hot, he can do meet and greets in Flagstaff. In the fall, he can chill out on Fourth Avenue. If the wanderlust moves him, he can take a drive up through the Salt River Canyon and serve constituents in Show Low and Globe. And if there’s something good about Phoenix, he gets to do that, too.

He doesn’t have to land in three states each day and shake down moneybags for cold hard cash. He won’t be trailed by an annoying press pool, confronted with the latest right-wing trash poll showing his ticket down eight in Michigan.

Not being a running mate, he doesn’t have to have every speech vetted a thousand ways to sundown by Team Harris to make sure he’s selling someone else’s line.

If he and Harris would have won together, then it just gets worse. 

John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner was a veep under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and historians debate whether he said the office wasn’t worth either a warm bucket of piss or a warm bucket of spit. What we can devine from that is the job most certainly sucks.

Vice presidents are tagged for calls they didn’t make. They’re held
accountable for conditions they didn’t create. Their constitutional
mandate is to continue breathing. Their public persona is being nothing but
a yes man or woman. Gaffes are how they most often make the news. Maybe they
spell potato wrong or maybe they launch an ill-advised war in Iraq or accidentally hit a friend with birdshot while hunting.
Maybe they just get chased through the U.S. Capitol by a lynch mob.

It’s not a happy place, as they live a life smothered by Secret Service protection.

I have this line I like from an old Eagles song: “I don’t know why fortune smiles on some/And lets the rest go free.”

Presidential fortune didn’t smile on Kelly. It sure as hell set him free.