We're in the awkward period before the conventions in which both parties have a presumptive nominee but the running mate has not been announced. It is traditionally assumed that the revelation of the running mate is the best way to refocus and reinvigorate a candidate's campaign, and the announcement is best made just before the convention.
Therefore, the identity of the running mate has to be a closely guarded secret, which is difficult to do when half of the damned press corps is trying to find out who your pick is.
So you feed them raw meat. You "dangle" it off of a hook so that the fools will take the bait and run with it to press.
Sometimes, the dangle is deliberate, like when an experientially weak candidate is paired with a former President, as Ronald Reagan did with his sworn enemy Gerry Ford in 1980, all the while circling in on the guy who had the second-most delegates, GHW Bush. (Trump's own campaign may playfully mention that GHW Bush is still available to be Vice President, again.)
Sometimes, the pick gets leaked so early that the candidate has to offer up other names for months just to keep things interesting. Hillary Clinton's camp is desperately swimming away from Julian Castro, but all the signs suggest he's going to be the guy.
And sometimes, the crazies do you the favor of offering themselves as bait, as Mrs. Palin is doing here.
Trump's options are pretty severely limited. He's got a credibility gap wider than the English Channel and continually underscores his own incompetence every day. The psychologists and pollsters seem to agree, and have agreed for over a century, that the way to fill this gap is to put an admiral or general on the ticket.
None of the chumps that Trump destroyed in the primaries will add anything to his campaign; some of them, like Christie and Cruz, are too ambitious and clever to trust in that office. They're probably all off the list. Ben Carson's efforts are probably just a dog-and-pony show designed to keep the press distracted, while a very short and brass-heavy list is examined. And it's not going to be a woman, either, because Donald Trump hates women.
But they will happily invite other fools like Sarah Palin to be laughed at by the press and public for the next ungodly long two months. Of course, by then Trump's own past will loom so large that the GOP may be scrambling about for two more candidates. But I doubt it!
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