January 4, 2007
Vice Presidents Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:10 PM EST It seems increasingly likely that Barack Obama will run for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. He has certainly been getting press that other hopefuls would give their right arms for. He is very personable, well-spoken, and a new face. That, of course, is also one of his biggest problems: His résumé is very thin. After seven years in the Illinois state senate, not in the leadership, he beat a very weak candidate in the 2004 election to win a U.S. Senate seat. Two years in the Senate is not much of a career in the political big leagues from which to launch a presidential bid. Many commentators have suggested that what he is really running for is not President but Vice President. A respectable showing in the primaries would make him a very attractive possibility for that nomination, which is in the gift of whoever wins the presidential one. He is only 45 years old, so he has plenty of time, and serving as Vice President would certainly take care of the résumé problem. The Vice Presidency has been a strange office. Constitutionally it could hardly be weaker. The Vice President serves as president of the Senate, but has a vote only if there is a tie. As a result, Vice Presidents, at least after the early days, were often very obscure, chosen for geographical reasons and then ignored once elected. Unless, that is, they inherited the Presidency, as did John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, and Chester Arthur. Once their terms were over they faded back into the obscurity from which they had come. There was an old joke about two brothers. When they grew up, one went to sea and one became Vice President. Neither was ever heard of again. The only vice-presidential quote to make it into Bartlett’s was by Thomas R. Marshall, Vice President under Wilson, who said that “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” There were exceptions, of course. Martin Van Buren was a major political figure in his own right and went on to be elected President, the last sitting Vice President to do that until George H. W. Bush. Theodore Roosevelt was very well known, but he was given the Vice Presidency so that Thomas Platt, who ran the New York State Republican Party, could get the bumptious Roosevelt out of the governor’s mansion and he could get someone into it who would do what he was told. “I am going to Washington,” Platt told friends just before the inauguration, “to watch Theodore take the veil.” Things didn’t work out too well for Boss Platt, thanks to an assassin’s bullet. But since World War II, the Vice Presidency has had a renaissance. It is still constitutionally powerless, but as the world has gotten more complicated and far more dangerous, presidential nominees generally have chosen more and more prominent politicians for the Vice Presidency and have kept them fully informed regarding what was going on. Dick Cheney is, in a very real sense, an assistant President. Harry Truman, in contrast, had not even known about the Manhattan Project when he suddenly found himself running the country. This has made the Vice Presidency a very attractive political position, which it never was before. Much publicity now comes the Vice President’s way. He lives in a terrific house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, and is well positioned to run for the top job, if it doesn’t fall to him through death or disgrace. Two postwar vice Presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford, inherited the White House, and five—Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush, and Al Gore, won their party’s nomination for President. So Barack Obama, should he choose to run, may well have a lot of upside potential and little downside risk. If he wins the presidential nomination, great. If he doesn’t, he’s well positioned to get the vice presidential one. If his ticket then wins, the presidential nomination in eight years’ time will be his to lose. If his ticket loses, it won’t likely be blamed on him, and he will be in good shape to run again in four years. I bet he goes for it.
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