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Picking 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
