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To be or not to be the vice-president
Every American politician says he (or she) does not want the job. Yet, when it is actually offered, few turn it down
- By Gordon Robison, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:08 July 2, 2008
- Image Credit: Luis Vazquez/Gulf News
The American vice presidency is a strange institution.
John Adams, the first person to hold the job, famously described it as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived".
Franklin Roosevelt's first vice-president, John Nance Garner, was even more scathing. He held the office for eight years, yet still said it was "not worth a bucket of warm spit" (that, at least, is how the quote is traditionally reprinted in family newspapers - a little imagination will lead you to what Garner actually said).
Every American politician says he (or she) does not want the job. Yet, when it is actually offered, few turn it down. Dwight Eisenhower held Richard Nixon in barely concealed contempt... but Nixon said 'yes' anyway. Lyndon Johnson's opinion of John Kennedy was not much higher, but that did not stop LBJ's acceptance of the No. 2 slot.
Johnson's fate explains why: eight of America's 43 presidents have died in office - a circumstance in which the vice-president moves up automatically.
Add to that Nixon's resignation and the five veeps (including Nixon, John Adams and the first George Bush) who were later elected president in their own right and it is easy to see why people want the job, however frustrating it may often seem to be.
Moreover, in recent years the vice-presidency has become more substantive. The statutory duties (preside over the senate, wait for the president to die) have not changed, but the politics have.
When Franklin Roosevelt died his successor, Harry Truman, knew virtually nothing of how the United States was carrying on the Second World War. Modern vice-presidents are unlikely to be this far removed from the day-to-day decision-making of the administration they serve.
Whatever one may think of Al Gore and Dick Cheney both have, albeit in very different ways, redefined the vice presidency.
Cheney, because of his reputed influence over President George W. Bush, is routinely described as the most powerful vice-president in the country's history. Gore spent eight years as a key player within the Clinton administration.
Whoever gets the nod from Barack Obama and John McCain in the coming weeks it is a safe bet that, if elected, they will expect to play the kind of central policy-making role that their recent predecessors have enjoyed.
And who will that be? With the party conventions coming later than usual this year we are all in for a long season of speculation, lobbying and hand-wringing in the run-up to the candidates' respective choices.
Choice
Of course, candidates all say exactly the same thing when this question comes up: the choice is about the future. Would-be presidents allegedly pick their seconds thinking only of who will be best-positioned to take over were the worst to happen. That, of course, is not true.
Whatever may be said in public the real reasons for picking a vice presidential candidate tend to be giving the ticket regional balance (hence Abraham Lincoln of Illinois' acceptance of Maine's Hannibal Hamlin, whom he had never met), the ability to carry a key state (as Johnson did by swinging Texas into Kennedy's column) or filling an ideological gap (the elder Bush served this function for Ronald Reagan).
Which, of course means Obama and McCain will pick... Sorry, I'm not playing that game.
We are already well into the season when a blizzard of names are bandied about. Few of them, however, have any real chance of getting the vice presidential nod. The selection process is, by its very nature, secretive (this is partly the result of the 1980s habit of subjecting prospective Veeps to a humiliating trial-by-media).
That means that many of the names now being bandied about in the press are there only because the persons-named want to hear their names themselves mentioned, assuming that this will enhance their own political power.
The bottom line - as it has been for decades - is that presidential candidates stand or fall mostly on their own merits.
When John Edwards failed to swing his home state of North Carolina (or much of anywhere else) into John Kerry's column in 2004 it was a cogent reminder that the utility of the vice presidential pick is, at best, limited.
So while there may be a lot of hand wringing on this particular subject over the coming month or so here is the thing to take away: ultimately, Americans vote for president, not vice president. Speculating about the lower half of the ticket may be fun, but it is not where the election is won or lost.
Gordon Robison is a journalist and consultant based in Burlington, Vermont & Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has lived in and reported on the Middle East for two decades, including assignments in Baghdad for both CNN and Fox News.
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