THE MOST RESPECTED DEMOCRAT IN AMERICA

Hey, did you bid?

It's anyone's guess how high the bidding will go this year when the chance to have lunch with investor Warren Buffett is put up for sale.

The online bidding begins at $25,000 on Sunday evening. A year ago, two investors paid $650,100 for the chance to have lunch with the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The auction benefits the Glide Foundation, which provides social services to the poor and homeless in San Francisco....

The 2006 lunch went for $620,100. That's one lunch. This man -- who's a Democrat -- is worshipped as a god.

Every other prominent Democrat in America can be turned into a pathetic, ineffectual, effete, hermaphroditic laughingstock in the public's eyes, given the right combination of circumstances and deployment of the usual character-assassination talking points. Not Buffett. He's staggeringly rich, and he's said to be ordinary and commonsensical. Therefore, he's a real man.

Clearly he's never had an interest in doing it, and I'm not saying I'd want him to, but if Buffett would run for president -- or, say, vice president with Barack Obama, whom he very much admires (he likes Hillary Clinton, too), I believe Democrats would be guaranteed victory. We'd certainly get some relief from the usual attacks on Democrats.

Obama gets grief for being a "messiah," yet no one thinks it's unseemly that Buffett is called "the Oracle of Omaha." He's incredibly rich but not creepily exotic like George Soros or those Hollywood richies. So he's exalted.

Just run the SOB four years from now if Obama doesn't win -- I don't care how old he is. He'll win.