Finally, Frank gets to the question Bayh had warned me about: "Is there anything I haven't asked you that might come out in Gawker or Daily Kos or some horrible right-wing blog?" I decide to confess the big family secret: that my octogenarian grandfather was once a bookie connected to the Philadelphia mob and was convicted of illegal gambling activity. (His sentence: probation, plus he had to have a party telephone line in his house for a number of years.) Even this, to my surprise, doesn't faze Frank. Too long ago. He tells me that he'll hire an investigator to interview my friends, enemies, even an ex-girlfriend, to look into a few of the potential problems the vet has raised. But he appears convinced that there's no deep dark secret—much less a sex tape—to be found. Of course, that doesn't necessarily make me fit to fill Spiro Agnew's shoes.

"The problem with these vetting processes," Bob Shrum had told me, "is that you're always vetting for the last problem." After Eagleton, for instance, everyone was on the lookout for medical anomalies; after Dan Quayle, vetters fixated on draft records. But a good vetter doesn't just take cues from the past; he anticipates fresh dangers.

Frank tells me that if he were vetting veep prospects for Mitt Romney, he knows exactly where he'd dig carefully: mortgages. "Someone could get tripped up by a liar loan," he says, referring to mortgages in which the borrower overstates his or her income. Given how prevalent the practice was during the housing bubble, Frank thinks it's possible that somebody on Romney's list did it, especially if he hails from a state where the bubble was especially outrageous. (Like, say, Florida or Nevada.)

Similarly, Frank says he'd spend a lot of time on a potential Romney veep's religious beliefs—and not just their current ones. Has the candidate always been an evangelical (John Thune) or a Catholic (Chris Christie)? Or has his path been circuitous, like that of Marco Rubio, who spent his childhood as a Mormon before converting to, and sticking with, Catholicism? Spiritual questing could be a problem, Frank explains, "because there's going to be skepticism about Romney's religion, and you don't want skepticism about both halves of the ticket."

Peering even farther into the future, Frank wonders about the types of questions that will be asked of the potential veeps in 2020 and beyond—people who are now in their twenties and thirties. "Right now the politicians we're dealing with are largely people who married their high school or college sweetheart," he says. "They don't have a history of being single in their twenties." The next generation of politicians probably will, which means vetters will want to know more about their sex lives as single adults. "Are there whips? Are there chains? To what extent do people kiss and tell?" Frank wonders. "We're learning with the David Maraniss book, here's Obama's ex-girlfriend turning over her diaries. And here's one of Christine O'Donnell's former hookups going to Gawker. I think future vetters are going to have to think about this."

A good vetter doesn’t just take cues from the past; he anticipates fresh dangers. frank tells me that if he were vetting vice presidential prospects for mitt romney, he knows exactly where he’d dig carefully: mortgages.

And what about me? Am I vice presidential material? When we meet for the final time, Frank tells me that his investigator didn't turn up much. Even one of my es had mostly nice things to say about me. A college pal told the investigator something I'd forgotten—that I'd named my bong after my grandfather—but Frank doesn't care about that. What does he care about? Well... My tax returns showed that I've made very few charitable contributions. ("There'd be a one-day story about how you don't give much.") My financial records revealed that I have way too much money in my checking account. ("Someone's going to say, 'Oh, he doesn't know how to manage his money. How can somebody who clearly knows so little be put in charge of our economy?' ") My medical history disclosed that ten years ago I had testicular cancer. ("People understand that.") My college drug use. ("Ideally, you're a politician already and somebody's asked you six years ago, and you said, 'Oh yeah, I used in college and I stopped after.' ") My grandfather. (The bookmaking, not the bong I named after him. "It comes up as an interesting story, but it doesn't get used against you. We have somebody research that and then feed it to a journalist: 'Hey, here's an interesting slice of Americana.' ")

"Skipping over the fact that you have no experience and we don't know where you stand on any issues," Frank says, it turns out my biggest problems are two that hadn't even crossed my mind: the tas we haven't paid on babysitters, and the housecleaner who might've been here illegally. Frank sums up the report he'd give to the guy at the top of the ticket. "We would say, 'He's got the domestic-help issue, and that has torpedoed candidacies in the past. You're going to have to make a judgment call, Governor, whether you want Jason Zengerle enough to weather that storm.' "

The real problem with Jason Zengerle, though, is one that Frank is too polite to say to me: I'm too boring—even for Mitt Romney. I'm Tim Pawlenty without the truck-driver father. I'm John Thune minus the tan. I'm Rob Portman without Ohio's eighteen electoral votes. There's no getting around what I am, and in modern politics, it's a killer: low risk, low reward.

Jason Zengerle is a GQ contributing editor.