Posted on 06/28/2008 5:40:14 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Not Exactly a Crime" is the title of a book on America's vice presidents published in 1972 -- a year before Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign for actually committing a crime.
The office of vice president has long been the butt of jokes -- you know the punch lines -- but as we await Barack Obama's and John McCain's choices for vice president, we do so with the knowledge that vice presidents in the last five administrations have been important officers of government. (Yes, including Dan Quayle -- see Bob Woodward and David Broder's book). How the vice presidency has been transformed is an interesting story that takes us from the Founding Fathers to recent history.
The framers of the Constitution created the vice presidency to solve the problem of succession. They expected that electors meeting in state capitals would vote for two candidates from different states, with the No. 2 vote-getter becoming vice president. It worked well twice. Then the unexpected emergence of political parties produced bizarre results.
In 1796, John Adams was elected president and his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, vice president. In 1800, the electors produced a tie between Jefferson and his ticket-mate, Aaron Burr, broken only by an opposition Federalist in the House of Representatives. The Twelfth Amendment promptly passed, providing that electors cast separate votes for president and VP. Parties would nominate one man for each office.
The result, with few exceptions, was the nomination of mediocrities to balance a ticket geographically or ideologically. In 1824 and 1828, the nomination for the dominant Jeffersonian Party was secured by John C. Calhoun, who disagreed bitterly with his two presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. After the first Democratic national convention took on the task of picking VP nominees in 1832, Calhoun resigned and returned to the Senate.
For 130 years, only one vice president -- Martin van Buren -- was elected president in his own right without having succeeded to the office first. Republicans re-nominated sitting vice presidents only twice in their first 100 years, until Richard Nixon was re-nominated and re-elected in 1956. One vice president nominated across party lines, Andrew Johnson, was so unpopular as president that he was impeached by the House and missed removal from office by one vote in the Senate.
The problem was that everyone knew vice presidents had little to do. Presiding over the Senate is a clerk's job, and opportunities to break ties there seldom arise. As late as the 1950s, veeps did business from an office in the Capitol and had little occasion to visit the White House.
When Harry Truman was summoned there on April 12, 1945, and told of Franklin Roosevelt's death, he did not know that the president was out of the city -- he had met with him just twice in his 82 days as vice president. After Truman's first Cabinet meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson took him aside and told him the government was developing a weapon of enormous power. This was the first time Truman had heard about the atomic bomb.
Truman's unpreparedness may have prompted some later presidents to give vice presidents useful things to do. Dwight Eisenhower sent Richard Nixon on important foreign trips. John Kennedy gave Lyndon Johnson responsibility for the space program. Gerald Ford gave the energetic Nelson Rockefeller some assignments, then dropped him from the ticket.
Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale turned the vice presidency around. Mondale had offices and staffers in the West Wing, regular one-on-one meetings with the president and access to top appointees. Their example has been followed since. And presidential nominees have not waited for the very last minute at the convention to pick their VPs since Ronald Reagan did it in 1980. Potential VPs are vetted closely and with a view to how well they could work with the president. An office that was long the vermiform appendix of American government has become a useful organ.
Gravitas is obviously in short supply for the post turtle candidate.
Cheney is the only veep that’s ever mattered. It’s an anomaly. Most Presidents don’t choose father figures as Veeps. They pick a Veep they can boos around, or ignore.
And senators-turned-presidents tend to die in office.
Cliff Notes Summary:
Obama - needs a Veep with credibility and experience. Someone who can attract the constituencies that are correct for doubting Obama's ability, tolerance of Christianity, patriotism and even his status of citizenship. He needs someone strong here who can attract the Hillary supporters his people have alienated without selecting Hillary, who will kill him.
McCain - A likely one-termer who needs to seek a conservative Veep who will unite his own party, fractured to the point of destruction by the alienation of conservatives who carry the party. He may gets some independents and lose some, they tip the scale in many cases, but if he doesn't get the conservative base behind him, it's game over before it begins. By not selecting a conservative Veep, McCain will only convince his backers he was never in the race to win.
Subtract those who were governors also.They are not “senators” becoming president, they are primarily governors.
Only two Presidents were currently members of the Senate when elected President, and both of them died in office (Harding and Kennedy).
They’ve always mattered because the President can croak.
The choices don’t usually actually effect the election though.
The absentee ballot will be the nail that seals McCain’s coffin, if the GOP doesn’t wake up pronto.
Why?? With $$500 million in walking around campaign money, Obama will have the resources to send people door-to-door boosting the number of ‘bogus’ absentee ballots for the Dems.
It is a fraud which has been growing exponentially the past four national elections, and this year promises to see the biggest number of inner city (and suburbian) bogus absentee ballots ever.
Under the old (legitimate) rules, one had to be an invalid, a cripple, legitimately out of state, or in the military to get an absentee ballot.
Under the new system, Dems have successfully pushed thru rules allowing an absentee ballot for everything short of a hangnail. The potential for abuse is legion.
McCain doesn’t have the balls or the money, I don’t believe, to get a handle on the problem.
Hey! The Dems are his big buddies, remember? They wouldn't do something underhanded (like voter fraud) to our boy Juan, would they? /s
McCain - A likely one-termer who needs to seek a conservative Veep who will unite his own party, fractured to the point of destruction by the alienation of conservatives who carry the party. He may gets some independents and lose some, they tip the scale in many cases, but if he doesn't get the conservative base behind him, it's game over before it begins. By not selecting a conservative Veep, McCain will only convince his backers he was never in the race to win.
Obama's campaign is the race card. Nothing else. McCain's VP, if white, cannot attack Obama effectively. A black conservative - possibly an Iraq or Desert Storm veteran - would attack Obama to devastating effect, just by his identity combined with the fact that he would embody the patriotism and humility that Obama lacks.There is no black who could effectively contend for the Republican presidential nomination, but the Constitution actually promotes affirmative action (the incentive to name a running mate from a different state than the presidential nominee) in the selection of a VP nominee. And if the Democrats challenged the Republican VP's credentials he would simply ask what is the Democrats' excuse for nominating an empty suit for POTUS?!
Obama would know perfectly well not to get involved in a fight with the opposing VP candidate. But the nomination of a black conservative VP by McCain would be so irritating that the Democrats would be unable to avoid doing it anyway. I think it is the sovereign path to victory by McCain. Even though I do not assume it would win any appreciable number of black votes, but would free the white guilt voter to vote for McCain.
The "white guilt vote" is Obama's, regardless.
The "white guilt vote" is, by definition, liberal Democrat. None will vote for McCain in any event.
The "white guilt vote" is, by definition, liberal Democrat. None will vote for McCain in any event.
I don't agree. Obama represents the idea of a government run by and for blacks, and there is only so much of that that white guilt can make a white go for. Put up a black on the other side, and that is enough to let the "guilty" white vote his own, and his county's, interest instead of the guilt.
But I could be wrong...
I simply can't imagine voters who might be moved by "white guilt" ever voting for McCain. Those folks are all liberals (or liberal moderates).
I guess I believe that liberals are generally hypocrites (as illustrated by the book "Do As I Say (not as I do). When it comes right down to it, they generally are selfish people. They want to vote for a black because it will make them feel good, and they put great store on political feelings.Put up a black conservative for VP, and they will be able to feel good about the ticket. And they will rationalize that what is good for them (not having a POTUS who holds them and their children in contempt) is good for the country. Which in fact it is, that is essentially the entire rationale for democracy. Nominating a black conservative for VP would be an act of leadership.
BTTT!
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