The Constitution of the United States assigns only two roles to the Vice President: presiding officer of the Senate and successor to a President who dies, resigns, or is unable to serve. Some of the Number 2 men of the past half century have indeed made significant contributions, but these were all in response to work delegated by the Chief Executive. For the most part, the principal impact of the Vice President is whether he helped get the President elected or vice-versa.
The Historical Background
The original Constitution adopted in 1787 said nothing about political parties and merely provided that the person who received the second highest number of electoral votes would be Vice President. George Washington, as expected, received one of the two votes cast by each member of the Electoral College and John Adams received a majority of the second votes to become the first Vice President.
By 1796, when Washington declined to run for a third term, parties and partisan politics had developed, and the Constitution no longer fit the circumstances. Adams, now head of the Federalist Party, narrowly defeated Thomas Jefferson, leader of the Democratic Republicans, but Jefferson became Vice President by receiving the second highest number of electoral votes. While Adams had been a big help to Washington in the Senate, Jefferson was just the opposite to Adams as he opposed him on both domestic and foreign issues.
The death knell for the original method for selecting Vice Presidents came in the 1800 rematch of Jefferson and Adams, when Jefferson and Aaron Burr, the Democratic Republican Vice Presidential candidate, both received 73 electoral votes. As provided by the Constitution, the House of Representatives chose Jefferson amid much bitterness and backbiting, and the Twelfth Amendment was swiftly adopted to mandate separate Electoral College ballots for the two offices.
From then until well into the 20th Century, the concern in choosing vice presidential candidates was generally geographic balance, north and south or east and west. The main exception was Republican Abraham Lincoln's second term selection of Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, to enable them to run on a National Union ticket and fend off a serious anti-Civil War challenge from General George McClellan, the Democratic candidate. A truly bizarre event was Theodore Roosevelt's nomination for Vice President in William McKinley's reelection run, allegedly to get him out of New York, where he was bedeviling the regular Republican machine, and into a less important office.
The Campaign Role
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1940 made the first public selection of a running mate, Henry Wallace, was informed four years later, as he sought a fourth term, that the left-leaning Wallace would be a major campaign liability. The subsequent choice of Senator Harry Truman was as consequential to the war and post-war era as TR's had been for the first decade of the century.
John F. Kennedy, facing a tough fight in which his Catholic faith and youth were expected to be issues, made the controversial selection of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas to reassure the nation in general and the South in particular on both counts. He also gave LBJ a significant role in monitoring one of his chief initiatives, the space program.
Ronald Reagan, conscious of misgivings about his political experience and outspoken conservative views, chose his moderate primary opponent, George Bush, possessor of the most extensive government resume in Washington. Bill Clinton, dismissed by some as merely a governor of a small state, picked Al Gore, a prominent Senator with a Washington pedigree.
Similarly, Barack Obama, with a thin political background, made Joe Biden, a six-term Senator his running mate, while his 2008 opponent, John McCain, also a multiple-term Senator, made the off-beat choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, as his. Many feel she was a drag on McCain.
So, while attention is beginning to focus on potential Republican nominees, it seems certain that the eventual candidate will give lots of attention to the second spot on the ticket.
Source: Vice President of the United States (President of the Senate) www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing /Vice_President.htm
David Hornestay - DavidH began a career as a freelancer after 34 years in government management. Keeping a hand in as a consultant in federal human ...
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