The American Vice Presidency (86 page)

“I can speak with authenticity about the middle class,” Biden said, “and it was a very good setup between me and Romney, because it almost offended me with his disregard for the folks I grew up with.” The 47 percent remark, Biden said, “went to the heart of it, because I
am
that 47 percent, my family is that 47 percent, the things I value most are those people.… Even if they told me not to, I couldn’t have been quiet [on] the 47 percent. That was the fundamental divide.”
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In claiming the mantle of champion of the middle class, Biden boosted the Democratic spirit. Obama then recovered in two subsequent debates with Romney, resulting in reelection of the Obama-Biden team.

As their first term came to an end, jolted just before Christmas with the horrible mass murder of twenty first-grade children and six adults in a Newtown, Connecticut, schoolroom, Obama chose Biden to lead a national response for stronger gun controls demanded by an outraged and grieving American public. Despite a broad and energetic campaign, the effort fell short in the opening months of the second term, but Biden vowed to continue pursuing his goals.

In all this, Biden could claim, however, that he had delivered on his pledge to “restore the balance” in a more limited but still influential role in the office compared with that of his immediate predecessor, Dick Cheney. Biden, seventy years old at the time but physically fit, did or said nothing to discourage speculation that he might make a third try for the presidency in 2016. His service alone in his first vice presidential term seemed worthy of such speculation. But with a continued expectation that Hillary Clinton might make a second bid for the Oval Office, it seemed more likely that Joe Biden would conclude his lengthy political career one step short of that long-held ambition.

Biden, in noting that Cheney had freed himself of the same speculation in taking himself out of consideration as a future presidential candidate, mused at the time that such talk continued about himself. “I haven’t taken it out of the possibility, it’s not where I am,” he said, “but the good news for me from my perspective is that everything that would make me a viable candidate also is the very thing that would make me a good vice president. As long as I’m seen, and as long as I do a good job here, which I hope I did the first four years, of taking on important projects, executing them well, being a part of a team that makes this a successful administration, that’s the stuff that will make me viable, and so I don’t have to make that decision now, and I haven’t, for real.… That’s a familial decision that you don’t get to make alone. I also don’t want to get into a position where everything I did was viewed through the prism of I’m running for the nomination, because I think that diminishes the degree to which I can be helpful to the president.”
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In any event, Joe Biden’s wide-ranging vice presidency had already provided in its own right a model for future occupants of the office and for the open collegiality and compatibility between Obama and Biden, which became a positive element in the administration’s governance of the nation.

THE EVOLVING

ASSISTANT PRESIDENCY

W
hen the founding fathers conceived the office of the vice presidency, for all the cavalier manner of its conception as a by-product of the electoral college, they anticipated it might produce the second most-qualified citizen to lead the country. The Constitution having stipulated that the vice presidency would go to the runner-up in the presidential balloting, the choices in the first two elections honored that expectation. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were high among the revolutionary era figures in the esteem of their contemporaries, and on balance their subsequent presidencies were judged favorably by history.

But there was little evidence that the founders had given serious thought to the prospect that the vice president thus elected might actually become president. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, provided for separate elections of the two officers in order to avoid the selection of candidates of rival political factions, as Federalist Adams and Anti-Federalist Jefferson were in their joint election of 1796. A presidential vacancy then would have meant a sharp change in factional control of the nation.

The next five vice presidents—Aaron Burr, George Clinton, Elbridge Gerry, Daniel Tompkins, and John C. Calhoun—for one reason or another were found wanting as presidential material or otherwise tarnished their service by personal shortcomings or misbehavior. None was the particular choice of the president under whom he served, or was chosen by him at all, or was a significant partner in his administration. Nor was the second office much of a stepping-stone to the presidency for years after Adams and Jefferson. After Clinton and Calhoun, the only two vice presidents to serve
under two different presidents, none other was renominated for a second term by a party caucus or convention for seventy-six years, until 1890, when James S. Sherman was elected to serve under William H. Taft. And none was reelected until Thomas A. Marshall in 1916, to continue serving under Woodrow Wilson.

It was not until selection of the eighth vice president, Martin Van Buren, in 1832 that a president, Andrew Jackson, decisively chose the man he wanted and then made him a key political and policy adviser. Van Buren earlier was Jackson’s presidential campaign manager and then his secretary of state in the first term. When Calhoun resigned as Jackson’s first vice president, Van Buren become his vice president for his second term. In 1836, Richard Johnson, the ninth vice president, was selected by the U.S. Senate to serve under President Van Buren after failing to win a majority in the electoral college. Little in Johnson’s background suggested he was of presidential caliber, and he eventually spent much of his time as the vice president back in Kentucky, running a hotel and saloon.

In 1864, in one of the most significant early cases of a president handpicking his running mate, Abraham Lincoln shunted aside his first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, a strong critic of slavery, in favor of Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, to run with him for his second term. Lincoln determined that he needed a Union fusion ticket to win reelection and gain time to end the Civil War. It was a fateful decision in terms of how the South was treated in the Reconstruction policies that followed.

In subsequent years, presidential nominees usually left the selection of their running mates to political party advisers who ran their campaigns. Senator Marcus Hanna, the Ohio kingmaker who masterminded William McKinley’s election in 1896, chose a successful businessman, Augustus Hobart, to be the twenty-fourth vice president. Hobart served as McKinley’s personal financial adviser as well as his virtual assistant president. But in 1900, after Hobart’s death, Hanna strenuously objected to pressure from the New York Republican boss Thomas Platt that led to the nomination of Governor Theodore Roosevelt as McKinley’s second-term running mate and as the twenty-fifth vice president. After the election, Hanna memorably told the president, “Now it is up to you to live.”
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In 1932, basic calculations and arrangements handled by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political advisers lured House Speaker John Nance Garner to
be his running mate and the thirty-second vice president during two FDR terms. But in 1940, for the third term, Roosevelt insisted on Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace as his standby, threatening not to run himself if the Democratic convention did not accept his choice. And in the aging Roosevelt’s fourth campaign in 1944, key political advisers sold him on the fateful selection of Harry Truman as the thirty-fourth vice president.

In 1952, the political neophyte Dwight D. Eisenhower was unaware that choosing a running mate was in his hands as the Republican presidential nominee. He left the selection to New York political advisers Thomas E. Dewey and Herbert Brownell, who orchestrated the nomination of Richard Nixon to be the thirty-sixth vice president. Thereafter, however, presidential nominees increasingly chose their running mates themselves, though usually with seasoned political advisers at their elbows.

In 1960 amid much internal opposition, John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon B. Johnson to strengthen his chances in the South. In 1964, LBJ tapped Hubert Humphrey after much false histrionics. In 1968, Richard Nixon went through a charade of consulting party leaders but then surprised them by picking Spiro Agnew as his running mate. The choice eventually raised questions about leaving the selection in the hands of a single person.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan reluctantly turned to George H. W. Bush after flirting with the possibility of choosing former president Gerald Ford. In 1988, Bush kept his decision from his closest advisers before disclosing Dan Quayle as his running mate, to the shock and consternation of his political brain trust. And in 2000, when Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush left it to Richard Cheney to find him a running mate, Cheney in a sense chose himself, becoming the forty-sixth and arguably the most powerful and controversial of all vice presidents.

Of the nine vice presidents who eventually ascended to the presidency, eight by death of the incumbent and one by the incumbent’s resignation, only two—Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman—were later generally judged to have been superior chief executives. A third, Lyndon Johnson, received high grades for domestic legislative achievements, but they were overshadowed by the historic American military withdrawal from Vietnam.

Furthermore, until the past half century most elected vice presidents neither carried out significant responsibilities nor were even given the opportunity to carry them out. Accordingly, the office was not seen as a
pathway to the presidency; on the contrary, as an otherwise ambitious Daniel Webster, who rejected the Whig Party nomination in 1848, observed, “I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.”
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Eventually, however, the concept of a de facto assistant president emerged out of occasional suggestions for a more formal designation. In 1956, the former Republican president Herbert Hoover proposed to a Senate subcommittee that an “administrative vice president” be created by Congress to relieve the president of his growing managerial burdens. But the idea was rejected on the grounds that the legislative branch ought not dilute the president’s own responsibilities.

The rather off-handed attitude toward the vice presidency began to change after 1972, when the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, only belatedly addressed choosing his running mate. When it was learned that his selection, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, had previously undergone shock therapy for mental illness, Eagleton was dropped from the ticket. McGovern, reflecting on the fiasco, proposed that more time be allotted after the presidential roll call for the nominee to weigh his choices and that he submit several names to the convention from which to choose his running mate. More important, he argued that responsibility for the selection should not rest in the hands of a single individual.
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Four years later, the Democratic presidential nominee, Jimmy Carter, was determined that there be no repetition of the preceding election’s troubles. He personally interviewed finalists vetted by aides before choosing Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, pointedly identifying him as qualified to assume the presidency if required and preparing him accordingly in office. That model has been generally followed thereafter in both major parties, though not all. In 1984, Mondale, as the Democratic presidential nominee, oversaw the vetting process, but his choice of the little-known congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate was obviously politically motivated, based on a bid for women’s votes. Her presidential qualifications escaped the thoughts of most veteran political observers.

Mondale himself later defended the choice in an interview for this book, saying, “I didn’t see how a campaign against Ronald Reagan could win with just an all-male ticket. I had to shake up the cards some way. If I left a
legacy,” he said, “it’s that I was part of opening the political party, the legal process, to women, and choosing Ferraro was a big step forward.”
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Mondale also said he regretted going through the process of personally vetting his prospective running mates, all of whom he already knew, unlike Carter in 1976. As for Ford, he said that after his flirtation with Reagan to be his running mate in 1980, he thought the vice presidential vetting process was “more show than substance.”
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In 1988, three months before the senior George Bush, as Reagan’s vice president seeking to succeed him, shockingly chose Dan Quayle as his running mate, the
Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Vice Presidency
overoptimistically declared, “The public, ever more aware of the need for successor presidents who can fill the office ably and faithfully, has taught politicians that they cannot increase their chances to win the election except by applying governance criteria to the selection of vice-presidential candidates.”
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It also said that a presidential nominee “who pays insufficient attention to governance criteria in choosing the vice-presidential nominee, will suffer for it in the election.… Ultimately, the price of a rash or overly ‘political’ nomination for vice president is paid in the coin of the realm: votes on election day.”
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That was hardly the case in the election of the Bush-Quayle ticket.

In 2008, the political community was jolted again when the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, chose the nationally obscure governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. McCain had met her only once, briefly, before she was hurriedly interviewed and presented to the public. Palin proved to be a charismatic candidate but transparently ill-informed on many major issues, again raising questions about the judgment of the man who chose her and that of his key political advisers. The decision continued to fall essentially to the presidential nominee, whether by diligent scrutiny of prospects or personal whim.