Sen. Larry Craig and Idaho Gov. Butch Otter had a “lengthy” phone conversation today, according to Otter’s office, and Otter’s not saying much more than that. Last week, Otter finished interviewing more than two dozen candidates to replace Craig should Craig resign from the Senate, and the governor made up his mind on whom he’d name – but didn’t tell that person. “He has not notified anyone,” said Otter’s press secretary, Jon Hanian. “I think that’s by design – it’s putting the cart before the horse. We don’t have a vacancy, so it makes no sense to go out and inform somebody that he’d selected them to a position that in reality doesn’t exist.”

That means the guv’s put prodigious amounts of time in the past month into a painstaking selection process that ultimately was for nothing. Said Hanian, “You get thrown a lot of curve balls in this job, and … we’ve seen quite a few of those during the course of this, haven’t we?”

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