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ОглавлениеPicking the Vice President
Elaine C. Kamarck
Brookings Institution Press
Washington, D.C.
Contents
The Vice Presidency as an “Arranged Marriage”
2
Breaking the Mold
From Arranged Marriages to Love Matches
3
The Partnership Model in Action
Al Gore
Dick Cheney
Joe Biden
4
Conclusion
Notes
Copyright
Introduction
Throughout history, the vice president has been a pretty forlorn character, not unlike the fictional vice president Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays in the HBO series VEEP. In the first episode, Vice President Selina Meyer keeps asking her secretary whether the president has called. He hasn’t. She then walks into a U.S. senator’s office and asks of her old colleague, “What have I been missing here?” Without looking up from her computer, the senator responds, “Power.”
Until recently, vice presidents were not very interesting nor was the relationship between presidents and their vice presidents very consequential—and for good reason. Historically, vice presidents have been understudies, have often been disliked or even despised by the president they served, and have been used by political parties, derided by journalists, and ridiculed by the public. The job of vice president has been so peripheral that VPs themselves have even made fun of the office.
That’s because from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the last decade of the twentieth century, most vice presidents were chosen to “balance” the ticket. The balance in question could be geographic—a northern presidential candidate like John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts picked a southerner like Lyndon B. Johnson—or it could be ideological and geographic—Governor Jimmy Carter, a Southern conservative, picked Walter Mondale, a Northern liberal; Senator Bob Dole picked conservative Congressman Jack Kemp to woo the tax-cutting supply-side faction of the Republican Party.
Sometimes, as with Carter and Mondale, these marriages of convenience worked. But often they did not. All too often the dynamic between the president and vice president ran the gamut from cold and distantly cordial to outright hostile. The result was vice presidents who were cut out of the action, relegated to trivial duties, or dispatched to attend funerals in foreign countries or to take part in other, largely ceremonial roles. If balance was the criterion for selection, it all but guaranteed that the office itself would be pretty uneventful. Formerly powerful senators suffered this fate. Harry Truman became a power in the Senate by taking on profiteering by defense contractors as America got ready for World War II.1 He gave up that key position for the vice presidency, a role in which he was kept so far out of the loop that he didn’t even know about the project to build the atom bomb until President Roosevelt died and Truman became president. Lyndon Johnson, the powerful Majority Leader of the Senate, found himself suffering one slight after another at the hands of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, kid brother of the president.
All of that changed dramatically when candidate Bill Clinton selected Senator Al Gore as his running mate and the model changed from “balance” to “partnership.” In the modern era, the office of vice president has developed its own importance and influence, beginning with Al Gore and increasing with Dick Cheney. It is not an exaggeration to say that these two probably exerted more influence on policy than all prior vice presidents combined. The partnership model has been the norm in every vice presidency since Gore’s selection. Unlike the fictional Selina Meyer, Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump did call their VPs. They also delegated substantial power to them and treated vice-presidential projects as presidential projects. Recent vice presidents have reshaped the office and the expectations Americans have for the office.
What made this change possible was not so much the personal characteristics of Gore or Cheney—although they both were powerful and experienced men. As we will see, the office has been occupied by many accomplished and once powerful former governors and legislators. What changed the relationship between presidents and their vice presidents has its roots in the nomination process. Changes in the nomination process itself have diminished the importance of balance on the ticket and increased the importance of partnership.
1
The Balancing Model
The Vice Presidency as an “Arranged Marriage”
Arranged marriages are not always all bad. Sometimes they grow into love and evolve into a relationship of warm civility kept alive by mutual concern over the children and respect for the traditions at the heart of why a couple were set up in the first place.
So too the traditional marriage between a president and his vice president. Sometimes a close and personal relationship develops between the two. But more often than not the relationship has been reminiscent of an arranged marriage—put together by political expediency. In many of those matches the relationship was cool and distant if not downright hostile.
The complexities of this relationship are evident in the very first pairing of President George Washington and John Adams, his vice president. Washington, the father of the young country, held a revered place in the politics of his day and hoped, against hope, to forestall the emergence of political parties. And yet all of the tensions that were to form the basis of the first American party system emerged during his presidency. Washington’s unique position allowed him to remain largely above the emerging fray. Adams, on the other hand, was not so lucky. One of his biographers, Page Smith, explains that Adams felt he had become a scapegoat for all of Washington’s unpopular decisions.1 Although Adams attended few cabinet meetings, he did carry the president’s water in the Senate, where he cast twenty-nine tie-breaking votes, a record to this day.2
By the time Adams became president the first party system was taking shape. In the early days of the Republic the vice presidency went to the person with the second-highest votes for president. The Founding Generation hoped that this system would, somehow, create unity in the government and allow the new nation to avoid the “mischiefs of faction”—eighteenth-century jargon for political parties. Wise and prescient in many of their decisions, the Founding Fathers blew it when it came to this early conception of the vice presidency. As soon became apparent, democracies without political parties are a virtual impossibility. The original structure of the selection process resulted in the first of many pairs of presidents and vice presidents that worked, not together, but at cross-purposes.
When the second American president, John Adams of Massachusetts, was elected, the second-place finisher, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, became vice president. Not only did the two men come from the two most powerful and most different states in the new country (one agrarian and slaveholding, the other commercial and nonslaveholding), they were also from different political parties—the only time in American history that has happened. Jefferson quickly defined the role of vice president as a legislative function, refusing to assist President Adams in his job. Furthermore, he was the first, but not the last, vice president who spent his time in office actively working to undermine his president and build up his own political fortunes.
Jefferson ran against President John Adams in 1800 and won. By then it was evident that having the president and vice president be from different political parties was not a very good idea. And so Congress passed the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that “The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President . . . ,” meaning, in practice, that the president and vice president would form a ticket and that both men would be from the same political party.
But adoption of the Twelfth Amendment did not end hostility between presidents and their vice presidents. As political parties formed, the nomination of the presidential candidate moved from the congressional caucus to national conventions of party leaders elected in state conventions. The first national convention was held in 1831 by the Anti-Masonic party, followed by the National Republicans in 1832 and then later the Democratic Republicans in 1832. We have held national conventions to nominate presidential candidates ever since. But the dynamics of those conventions have changed greatly in the years since 1972. Unless a popular incumbent president was running for renomination, in the old days delegates arrived at the conventions having some idea of who the leading candidates for president were but needing days of intense bargaining before they could decide on a candidate. Multiple ballots were often needed to come to a consensus on a nominee. As part of the complex bargaining the vice-presidential candidate was the most important bargaining chip and was often chosen to placate the region of the country or the faction of the party that did not win the presidential nomination. Hence “balancing the ticket” became the dominant strategic imperative for choosing the vice president.
Not surprisingly, the balancing model continued to produce pairs of presidents and vice presidents who disliked and distrusted each other. Presidents tried, as much as possible, to ignore their vice presidents. They did not include them in the decisions of government, let alone assign them important responsibilities.
The most common balancing was geographic. According to political scientist Jody C. Baumgartner, in the years between 1804 and 1896 only five presidential tickets were not regionally balanced.3 Balance can be ideological as well as geographic. Geographic balance, especially between North and South, has been synonymous with ideological balance for much of American history. For instance, in the elections leading up to the Civil War, winning tickets included a southerner and a northerner. When the Whig Party convention nominated Senator William Henry Harrison from Ohio to be their presidential nominee, they looked to fill the vice-presidential slot with someone from a slave state. Thus John Tyler, a Senator from Virginia, was nominated. (Harrison died in office after only thirty-two days and Tyler became president.)
Given that the geographically balanced ticket was often also ideologically balanced, it is not surprising that when the ticket won it proved to be highly dysfunctional in government.
Perhaps one of the most disastrous balanced tickets ever was the result of Abraham Lincoln’s decision to dump his first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, and to replace him with Andrew Johnson. Lincoln was afraid of losing the election of 1864 and thus the chance to reconstruct the Union. So instead of directing the delegates to renominate Hamlin, a former Senator from Maine who was staunchly antislavery, Lincoln, without Hamlin’s knowledge, directed the delegates to nominate Senator Andrew Johnson from Tennessee. Johnson was a supporter of slavery but the only Senator from a slave state who voted against seceding from the Union.4 Perhaps had Lincoln lived, the inclusion of a southerner and former Democrat in the government may have helped to create a smooth Reconstruction period. As we know from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s famous book on Lincoln, Team of Rivals, Lincoln believed he could manage disagreement in government.5
As president, Johnson proved to be a lopsided supporter of the former Confederates and a firm opponent of rights for freed slaves. His positions so enraged the Republican Party that he was impeached and missed being convicted by only one vote. Johnson was not renominated by the Republican Party nor did he win the nomination of the Democratic Party, whose positions he espoused.
An especially dysfunctional pair was formed at the turn of the century in the case of “the Hot Tamale and the Indiana Icicle”—one wit’s description of the Republican presidential ticket of 1904. In order to please the Republican Party’s conservative wing, which was not at all happy with the radical reformist politics of Teddy Roosevelt, that year’s convention forced Senator Charles Fairbanks (R-Ind.) upon him as his running mate. Fairbanks was as different from Roosevelt as possible: He was cold and distant, in marked contrast to Roosevelt’s famous ebullience; he was heir to the old-guard McKinley faction within the Republican Party, in contrast to Roosevelt’s more modern aspirations for his party; and he was from the Midwest, whereas Roosevelt hailed from New York City. Roosevelt’s true love was a Congressman named Robert R. Hitt of Illinois. But getting Hitt on the ticket would have meant a fight between Roosevelt and the convention bosses. In the end, the vice presidency was not significant enough for Roosevelt to fight over and he accepted Fairbanks.6
Hence one of many loveless matches. Fairbanks was relegated to obscurity almost immediately, perhaps because he publicly opposed many of Roosevelt’s more progressive programs, such as the Square Deal. Fairbanks was so out of the loop that when Roosevelt left town important tasks were given to William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War and anointed successor. Having nothing to do in the executive branch, Fairbanks took seriously his job of presiding over the Senate, where he occupied himself by leading convoluted schemes against Roosevelt’s initiatives. Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Fairbanks spent much of his vice presidency running for president—but unlike Jefferson, he did not succeed. Roosevelt threw his popularity behind Taft when his term ended. Taft beat Fairbanks at the 1908 Republican convention by a comfortable margin.
It is well known that Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin, had a less-than-passionate marriage to his wife Eleanor. So too with Franklin’s first vice president, who was chosen as the result of a political deal. This “arranged” vice presidency ended up being his second loveless marriage.
Speaker of the House John Nance Garner from Texas ran for president against Roosevelt in 1932. On the first ballot at the Chicago convention Nance came in third with a mere 90 votes to Roosevelt’s 666 votes. But in those days, it took winning two-thirds of the votes cast at the convention to choose a nominee. In spite of Roosevelt’s impressive first ballot showing, the expected stampede to Roosevelt was so slow to materialize that it caused panic among his floor leaders. Finally, after much bargaining, Texas moved to Roosevelt and the nomination was his, but at a cost—in the deal, Garner was placed on the ticket as vice president.
The convention deal was the beginning of this ultimately failed relationship. While Garner started out as a loyal member of the team, by the second term he came to disagree with just about everything Roosevelt did, especially his plans to pack the courts and his policies toward labor. Moreover, he let people know it. The official Senate history of Garner includes the following anecdote around the plans to pack the courts:
While never issuing a public statement against the bill, Garner demonstrated his disapproval with two symbolic gestures. First, he held his nose and gave an emphatic “thumbs-down” sign as the bill was introduced on the floor of the Senate. Then, during the subsequent congressional debate, Garner suddenly departed from the Capital in June to return to Texas. It was the first time he had left Washington while Congress was in session.7
By the end of Roosevelt’s second term, Garner, like other vice presidents before him, was openly running for president, expecting that Roosevelt would abide by the then unwritten rule that presidents only serve two terms. And yet, even when Roosevelt made it clear that he would go for a third term, Garner stayed in the race. Not surprisingly, he was replaced as vice president and retired from politics in 1941 after serving two not very happy terms. Perhaps Garner’s most significant contribution to the vice presidency was his famous declaration that the office was “not worth a warm bucket of piss.” (The quote has been cleaned up from time to time to read “not worth a warm bucket of spit,” but the essential meaning has lived on.)
Even when presidents themselves were publicly respectful of their vice presidents (many of whom represented a different faction of their party), the same rules didn’t apply to their staffs. Kennedy’s staff, especially his brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was well known for their nonstop derision of Vice President Lyndon Johnson. To many on the Kennedy staff Johnson was an affront to Camelot, someone they tried to ignore as much as possible and who they secretly referred to as Uncle Cornpone.8 In the White House real estate is everything and the closer to the Oval Office the better the real estate. Johnson’s vice-presidential office was in the Old Executive Office building—outdoors and across the driveway from the Oval Office. In other words, it was about as far away as one can get from the Oval Office and still be in the compound. And his attempts to be read into important information in the White House were frequently rebuffed.9
In a pattern that psychologists will recognize from case histories of family abuse, where the abused child becomes an abusing parent, Lyndon Johnson, formerly the all-powerful Majority Leader of the Senate, became an abused and neutered vice president who went on to do the same to his own vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey’s list of projects included a wide variety of second-class assignments, such as chairing the President’s Council on Youth and Opportunity, presiding over the Council on Marine Resources and Engineering, and heading a task force on Native American opportunity, another on recreation and natural beauty, and another on promoting tourism.
