Potential Obama Running Mate Appears With McCain

Former NATO commander General James Jones is seen as a potential running mate for Barack Obama – though he's considered something of a long shot. After Jones' name was bandied about following a meeting by Obama's veep vetters on Capitol Hill, we put him on our list of potential Democratic vice presidential candidates.

But as the New York Sun reports today, Jones doesn't exactly appear to be pressuring Obama to give him the job. The paper reports that as Obama held briefings with military and foreign policy leaders in Washington yesterday, Jones "was in Missouri, sitting on an energy security panel convened by Mr. Obama's Republican rival, Senator McCain, who praised him as 'a great friend and a great patriot.'"

As the Sun notes, Jones has kept his political affiliations close to the vest, with a former Pentagon colleague saying he isn't sure which political party Jones belongs to. That may not be an enitrely bad thing, as Obama takes pains to portray himself as someone looking to reach across the aisle. A critic of the war in Iraq, Jones would bring to the Democratic ticket foreign policy gravitas; as we noted on the bio page, however, he has an extremely low profile and is untested in handling the everyday duties of a national campaign.