VP Role Has Confused Folks From Day One
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 8, 2008; C01
The great edifice that is the United States Constitution has always had eccentricities, wobbly parts, some joists held together with duct tape. From one edge juts a curious protrusion, an architectural afterthought. It is called the vice presidency.
The Framers didn't know what to do with the backup executive. He was conjured very late in the summer of 1787, as the Constitutional Convention was winding down. He had no power at all, initially -- he was just a body, a seat-warmer, ready to step forward if the president were impeached or keeled over. Eventually the Framers gave him a busywork job:
"The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote" -- you can see them winging it here -- "unless they be equally divided."
So began the long and twisted saga of what John Adams called "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." His successor as vice president, Thomas Jefferson, had little interest in the job and went home to Monticello. The third vice president, Aaron Burr, is famous for gunning down Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, and later tried to start a breakaway republic in the West, with himself as emperor.
So it went for many years and many vice presidents, none more egregious than the ninth, the debt-ridden, disheveled, wild-haired Richard Mentor Johnson, who spent much of his tenure back in Kentucky, running a spa and tavern.
"Over most of America's history, the vice president has been standby equipment," says Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter's veep.
All that has changed, however. Mondale played a key role in upping the veep's profile. Today the incumbent vice president is widely regarded as the most powerful in history, a potent force, unfettered, almost a rogue operative. The job remains sufficiently enigmatic that Dick Cheney recently contended from his White House sanctum that he was not, in fact, a member of the executive branch. And there is an active academic debate over whether the Constitution bars someone like Bill Clinton -- now ineligible for the presidency -- from being elected vice president.
"It's a bizarre office. It's quite strange," says Rick Shenkman, a historian at George Mason University and author of "Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter."
In recent days we have seen again how the vice presidency enlivens our politics. The pundit class obsessed over Barack Obama's search for a running mate, and pondered whether he should pick his archrival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. He played it safe and by the book, going with veteran senator Joe Biden of Delaware. That rather ho-hum choice found its reciprocal number a week later, when John McCain picked as his partner Sarah Palin, the feisty governor and "hockey mom" from Alaska.
Evangelicals and hard-right conservatives roared their approval. Critics howled that she wasn't qualified. Reconstructions of McCain's decision-making process suggested that he knew her about as well as he knew his cable guy.
It seems the vice presidency has always inspired a certain level of drama and nonlinear politics. The institution has an innate aversion to predictability. Perhaps this is how the Framers wanted it all along: one job in government that would always keep things interesting.
* * *
Mondale may be best known to the public as a failed presidential candidate (wiped out by Ronald Reagan in 1984), but among historians he's known as a game-changing vice president. Mondale views himself that way, too.
He recalls that, after becoming vice president-elect in 1976, he paid a courtesy call on Vice President Nelson Rockefeller at his home in the District's Foxhall neighborhood (no way would a tycoon like Rockefeller stay in that official veep shack at the Naval Observatory).
"He was typical of vice presidents. He didn't have anything to do," Mondale says.
They were waiting for dinner to be served when the phone rang.
"Ohhh," Rockefeller said, "how nice it is to hear the phone ring."
That December Mondale wrote a famous memo (famous, at least, in the academic micro-niche of Vice Presidential Studies) to Jimmy Carter outlining an expanded role for the vice president as a counselor with access to all the top national security meetings. He wouldn't have any line authority and wouldn't be put in charge of feel-good commissions like past vice presidents. He'd be more of a deputy president.
Carter not only agreed but gave Mondale a plum spot in the West Wing, an upgrade from the digs in the Old Executive Office Building.
But Mondale doesn't like how the office has evolved under Cheney.
"The Cheney presidency -- vice presidency -- has really gone off the tracks," Mondale says. "It became an office of secret, unaccountable, extra-legal exercise of power. None of us ever thought it would be abused in this way."
The preeminent vice-presidential scholar in the country is surely Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University who has devoted his career to studying vice presidents.
"It's a fascinating office to study because it's an office that, for all of our history, has been a national laughingstock," Goldstein says. "Now, for the first time in our history, people are using the phrase imperial vice presidency, which would have been an unimaginable oxymoron."
The vice president's role has been a cause of confusion since early September 1787, when the Framers dreamed it up. Rifling through James Madison's notes of the Constitutional Convention, we see that the veep is made president of the Senate only because otherwise, as one delegate puts it, "he would be without employment."
Indeed, the vice president appears to be a side effect of other considerations. Going back to our original architectural metaphor: The veep is what architects would call a spandrel. He's there because other things need to be there. Madison records one delegate opining, "He was introduced only for the sake of a valuable mode of election which required two to be chosen at the same time."
This part of the genesis of the vice presidency can be hard to follow. The Framers never for a moment thought the president needed a Mondale-like adviser or a Cheney-like super-deputy. Their main concern was that they wanted electors from the states to be forced to vote for two people, and not from the same state. The reasoning, historians surmise, is that states would habitually throw their support behind a favorite son as the presidential candidate. Virginians would vote for a Virginian, New Yorkers for a New Yorker, etc. But if they had to cast a second ballot, that second choice, under the Constitution, couldn't be another favorite son.
Follow this logic to its conclusion: The Framers were thinking that the No. 2 pick of many of the electors would be a nationally recognized figure who would wind up with more votes, total, than any of the No. 1 picks. It's kind of like they wanted the vice president to be president.
But chaos ensued. The Framers failed to anticipate the rise of powerful political parties. The first fiasco happened in 1796, when John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson. Since Jefferson had the second most electoral votes, he became Adams's vice president -- even though they were from rival political parties.
Then came the disaster of 1800. Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, wound up with the same number of electoral votes. Because electors didn't distinguish between a "presidential" vote and a "vice presidential" vote, the election was thrown to the House, which was controlled by the Federalists. Burr, a notorious scoundrel, may have quietly lobbied for the top job; Jefferson had to cut a backroom deal or two. Finally, after many weeks and 36 ballots, the House finally voted to give Jefferson the job he'd rightly won in the election.
The episode demanded a Constitutional fix, the 12th Amendment, and in the process there was some consideration of putting the kibosh on the vice presidency altogether. The veep played a role in two more amendments dealing with elections and successions, the 20th and 25th.
One day we'll get it exactly right.
* * *
The job has served as a portal into the highest level of government of an interesting assortment of people. Some were brilliant; some were useless. Theodore Roosevelt came in through the veep hole, but so did Spiro Agnew. Call it the Roosevelt-Agnew Spectrum. Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore, while Agnew is mostly remembered for resigning during a bribery scandal and calling the press corps "nattering nabobs of negativism."
History shows that Richard Nixon, in the summer of 1968, picked Agnew with minimal vetting. In his memoir "RN," Nixon wrote that Agnew seemed dignified and moderate and that he might help with the states bordering the South. Nixon first offered the job to two no-name cronies. His account is very offhand and reveals that, as late as 1968, the vice presidency was an afterthought. Agnew quickly made a fool of himself, calling one reporter a "fat Jap" and referring to Polish Americans as "Polacks."
Goldstein, the veep scholar, votes for Agnew as the worst of the lot. But there have been others who do not tower over the historical landscape. It seems likely that J. Danforth Quayle is doomed to have an obituary that will mention in the first few paragraphs that he couldn't spell the name of a common root vegetable. And there was Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's No. 2, whose rambling inaugural speech convinced listeners that he was completely sloshed.
Some vice presidents manage to surprise the skeptics. Many felt Harry Truman wasn't up to the job when he assumed the presidency upon the death of FDR in the closing months of World War II. He hadn't been in the loop. He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project. "Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman only saw each other twice during the 83 days they were in office together," reports historian Roger Porter of Harvard. But after taking some time to get his footing, Truman did just fine.
And of course there are vice presidents that no one remembers. Levi Morton ring a bell? William Rufus King? Schuyler Colfax?
You could plausibly argue that the vice president represents a (small-d) anti-democratic element in our political system. Voters now spend well more than a year cross-examining presidential candidates in a protracted primary battle. To get a presidential nomination, you have to earn it on the stump, in debates, in fundraising, in political connections. But to become a vice president, you potentially need to merely catch one other person's fancy.
"This is a flaw in the system," says historian Alan Brinkley of Columbia University. "Vice presidents may not be important when they're vice president, but they're really important if the president dies. And no one has vetted them except the person who has chosen the vice-presidential candidate."
That's not precisely true: The voters decide on the ticket in November. But the bottom of the ticket is rarely a significant factor. (Don't tell anyone, but Biden and Palin probably won't make a huge difference.)
What's indisputable is that the moment someone is tapped to be the running mate of the presidential nominee, he or she leaps toward the front of the line of potential future presidents.
Not once in the past half-century has a sitting vice president sought a presidential nomination and failed to get it. Fourteen men one-third of our presidents -- have first served as vice presidents. (For those doing the math, there have been 42 presidents so far; Grover Cleveland, with his nonconsecutive terms, gets counted twice, which is why George W. Bush is called the 43rd president.) Of the 14 veeps turned POTUSes, eight assumed office upon the death of the president, and a ninth, Gerald Ford, became president when Richard Nixon resigned. (For Al Gore, the office proved not to be a springboard to the presidency -- why not is of course a long story -- but to the Nobel Peace Prize.)
Either Joe Biden or Sarah Palin will be the next occupant of the quirky office of the vice president of the United States. The other has a good shot at historical obscurity. Would-be veeps are destined to become trivia answers. Thus it has always been with the No. 2 slot. Let us listen again to Vice President John Adams: "Today I am nothing; tomorrow I may be everything." It's a little crazy, but it's how we do it here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/07/AR2008090702714.html
No comments:
Post a Comment