I watched Meet the Press Sunday morning with slightly more contempt than usual. For whatever reason, I thrive on bringing myself to the very brink of insanity just to see what will happen. The guests on the show were David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, and Geoff Garin, Hillary’s new Mark Penn.

Could there be a more thankless job right now than being Hillary’s new chief strategist? Geoff looked like a lifelong bureaucrat who had been mercilessly ripped from his comfortable desk job crunching numbers for policy papers and flung out into the spotlight. I almost couldn’t bear to watch.

Now, the job of the campaign strategist is, essentially, to be the asshole that your candidate can’t be. You are the designated asshole. You are slimy. You are sleazy. You will say anything to help your candidate get elected. You have wanted to be the biggest asshole your entire life and you finally got your chance.

Let’s just look at a sampling:

AXELROD: Look, first of all, we repudiate—that was a terrible thing that, that soldier, that veteran [as a spokesperson for the campaign, he claimed that Hillary would not have the ‘moral authority’ to lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Solider] said on our conference call, and it was reminiscent of the time that someone on a conference call for your campaign compared our health care plan to Nazi Germany, and Howard Wolfson rightly repudiated that. We repudiate this. You can’t control the way your…

GARIN: But that—you were…(unintelligible)…you weren’t even holding…(unintelligible).

AXELROD: Just, just, just let me finish, Geoff. Just let me—just let me, let me, let me…

GARIN: You said you were only answering when asked.

AXELROD: Let me finish.

GARIN: Sorry.
…..

AXELROD: But the, you know, as long as we’re on the subject, and I don’t want to dwell on this, the, the, you—did you not put a negative ad on this weekend in Philadelphia? The–100 percent negative ad attacking Senator Obama?

GARIN: No. I don’t believe we did.

AXELROD: Yeah, you did. Go back and check with your people, and it was, it’s an ad on lobbying, and it’s circulating…

GARIN: It’s not. It, it ends up, I believe, with…

AXELROD: No, no, it’s 100 percent negative ad, Geoff. Go back and ask your people… Yesterday in Pennsylvania, Senator Clinton said that Senator Obama’s health care plan would leave 15 million Americans in the cold.

GARIN: In response to your negative ad.

AXELROD: Just a second. Just a second. “Just leave them in the cold.” She knows that that’s not true.

Really, my favorite part of these faux-discussions is the constant refrain of “let me finish.” Because what they’re trying to say is OH SO IMPORTANT even though they have no idea what they’re going to say next. I have employed this tactic on more than one occasion when I can’t bear to hear anyone talk but myself because I am the smartest person in the room.

“Let me finish! Let me finish — if I could just finish, j-just a second…” And then, once I’ve out-whined everyone else, I’m at a loss for words. So there’s a pause in the conversation, someone else butts in, and I have to start up again, frantically waving my hands, “Wait! Wait! LET ME FINISH!”

I’ve even learned a new trick. Any time I say something that might be construed as offensive, I just have to follow it up with, “I [repudiate] [reject] [denounce] those comments,” and then, immediately, “Can I finish?”