"[D]oubling down on the bland, middle-aged white guy quotient on the Republican ticket could be a major mistake."

Writes Chris Cilizza, giving 3 reasons why Rob Portman is the wrong VP choice for Romney. One of the reasons is "Boring":

Portman is not exactly Mr. Exciting. (When your calling card for charisma is a chicken impersonation, it’s pretty slim pickings in the personality department.)

Must everything be about chicken? I would invite everyone to read "15 Genuinely Interesting Things About Rob Portman." The "great impression of a chicken" is in there, and in fact, there's another one with chickens:

He assembled a chicken coop for his wife's Christmas present this year and he gave her four chickens that live in their backyard. They lay four eggs a day.

To be fair to Cilizza, he also wrote a column about why Portman would be a great pick. In that analysis, boringness was a plus:

The rap on Portman is that he’s a boring guy who no one knows. That fact virtually ensures that if Portman is the pick the narrative that will emerge will be along the lines of “he’s more interesting that you might think!”. It’s just how these things tend to work.

I see that column links to the "15 Genuinely Interesting Things" that I remembered.

By the way, will it ever become politically incorrect to say white men are boring? People assume that it's safe to be racist and sexist when you're insulting traditionally privileged groups, but if you are one of those people who's felt the comfort of that insulation, I'd like to invite you to consider the way those insults always contain an implicit stereotype insulting the traditionally disadvantaged groups. If you say white men are boring, you're also saying something about women and about black people.

Oh, but it's a compliment — you say — to call someone interesting.

Is it? And there's a big difference between saying that a specific person is interesting and asserting that a particular group is "interesting." Black people are interesting — Is that something you think is acceptable to say?

ADDED: Remember those pathetic people who ate rats in an art gallery and imagined that they were adding to their interestingness? In the linked post, the commenter t-man said:

The sad man who lives in fear of seeming to be uninteresting brought to mind the classic Bugs Bunny lines:

My, I'll bet you monsters lead in-teresting lives. I said to my girl friend just the other day, 'Gee, I'll bet monsters are in-teresting.' I said. The places you must go and the things you must see -- my stars! I bet you meet lots of in-teresting people too. I'm always in-terested in meeting in-teresting people. Now let's dip our patties in the water!

 Now let's dip our patties in the water!