REED

WASHINGTON — The mentioning season is upon us, and Sen. Jack Reed’s name has begun to pop up in print, blogs and TV as a possible ticket-mate for front-running Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

But Reed, emphatic in his declarations of non-interest in a national candidacy, is ready for his 15 minutes of near-fame to be over. “It’s very flattering” to be mentioned, Reed said last week, “but my intention is to run for reelection to the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island.”

The Rhode Islander added a Shermanesque declaration about the vice-presidential nomination: “I have no intention to seek it or even, if offered it, to accept.”

Reed stressed, further, that neither Obama nor rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, nor anybody representing their campaigns has ever broached with him the topic of a place on the national ticket.

So Reed said the notion of a vice-presidential nomination for him is “not only hypothetical, but it ain’t going to happen.”

The Reed vice-presidential balloon — with many others attached to presidential candidates of both political parties — has been floated in the blog-osphere for some weeks now. In a sense, it logically followed the occasional flurries of speculation that he would make some Democratic president a fine secretary of defense — another job that Reed has flatly said he does not want.

Reed’s name arises in such discussions because his military background is unusual in a liberal. Relatively few prominent elected Democrats of his generation have served in the military. Even fewer are service-academy graduates who went into the military as a career. Congressional insiders, of course, have known this about Reed since he was elected to the House, in 1990 — he was promptly awarded a seat on the House Armed Services Committee.

When he joined the Senate Armed Services Committee, in 1997, he soon became a sought-after traveling partner on official trips to overseas trouble spots.

Hence the idea that Reed would balance the inexperience of fellow Senator Obama on defense issues. That has been the basis of the mentions of Reed by the pundits — mainly in blogs — during the early weeks of this year.

Commentators have also noted, to be sure, that Reed is not perfect ticket-balancing material. For one thing, no Democrat should have any trouble sweeping Rhode Island’s four electoral votes in the fall.

Over the last two weeks, the Reed-running-mate idea suddenly got much bigger play – in a Washington Post column and in a Newsweek magazine column. (The magazine piece also called Reed, erroneously, a hero of the Vietnam War. Like the overwhelming majority of West Point men in the Class of 1971, Reed never went to Vietnam because the U.S. presence there was rapidly shrinking.)

The Washington Post column on Feb. 17 said of Reed: “This low-profile Rhode Island senator, the son of a school janitor, has some intriguing advantages. A West Point grad and an Army Ranger, Reed is a leading Democratic expert on military matters, a thoughtful and cautious wonk who is often mentioned as a future Pentagon chief. But like Obama, he opposed the Iraq war from the start.”

The same morning CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Reed about the item on his nationally televised newsmakers program.

“What about the vice presidency, if it came down to it?” Blitzer said. “No,” Reed replied. “You’re not interested in that?” Blitzer ventured. “No,” said Reed. He went on to say that he already has “an incredibly important job, now, as the United States senator representing the people of Rhode Island.”

Reed said much the same thing in an interview later in the week with The Providence Journal. “I have one of the most challenging and exciting and interesting jobs in the world. I love to do it,” he said. “It gives me … an opportunity to handle a whole range of issues.”

Shermanesque though his disclaimers may be, Reed’s fans in the liberal blogosphere may not quite be done with him yet.

Daily Kos, a liberal Web log founded and edited by Markos Moulitsas, continued to beat the drum for Reed even after the senator threw cold water on the ticket-balancing idea during the interview with Blitzer.

Friday’s Daily Kos argued a point that many Rhode Islanders would agree with: Reed would bring to the Democratic ticket “foreign-policy and defense-policy chops that few Democrats can rival.” The blog called Reed a “behind-the-scenes powerhouse,” noting that senators of his seniority (he was elected in 1996) are rarely assigned to powerful seats on both the Armed Services Committee and the Appropriations Committee.

As Reed said in the newspaper interview, “I guess it’s a matter of small talk around Washington.” He added once more with emphasis: “I am running for my term in the United States Senate.”

jmulligan@belo-dc.com