Playbook is coming to you this morning from the Best Western in Lexington, Va., where we’re participating in the Spring Kickoff for the 100th anniversary of the Washington and Lee University Mock Convention, a tradition-laden quadrennial extravaganza in which the students set up a massive research operation to try to accurately predict the nominee of the party out of power. In 1988, president-to-be Bill Clinton spoke to the students, then played the sax at a beer blast out at one of the houses in the country where juniors and seniors live.

In 1972, Jody Powell answered the siren call of pinball and beer with students and missed the keynote address by his boss, one Gov. Jimmy Carter. The convention used to be in May of election year. This one is Jan. 25-26, but the students are still fretting about whether they need to move it up sooner to be relevant in this hyper-speed cycle. Playbook was on a Spring Kickoff panel in Lee Chapel with Chuck Todd, Larry Sabato and Steve Jarding. The moderator was the convention’s political chairman, L. Wesley Little, who had researched our past statements so thoroughly that he challenged me to defend something I had once written about Bill Bradley. Todd, the political director of NBC News, stole the show when he said the election of Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) in November meant that in an electoral sense, Virginia had “seceded from the Confederacy.” He then turned around with a gesture of apology to the recumbent sculpture of the school’s former president, Robert E. Lee, lying in state in the crypt behind us. Gen. Wesley Clark speaks on the Lee Chapel Lawn this evening.