Does the Vice-Presidency Matter?

I've never been afraid to write a piece on Tuesday to be published on Wednesday, knowing that something was going to happen Tuesday night that might make my piece less relevant.

In today's case, there was a vice-presidential candidates debate last night.  Someone won, someone lost, probably; someone dropped a few jolly zingers and someone was the butt of some other jolly zingers.  And apparently one was a real jerk (hint: the one on the left). The two second-spot candidates don't strike anyone as the topic of ridicule, so it will have been interesting to have seen what happened.

Maybe they actually talked about things we are really interested in, like the economy and terrorists and stuff.  Naaaah.

At any rate, all that got me thinking yesterday about the importance of the vice presidency, or its relative lack of importance, and that started to make me wonder why anyone even ran for the office in the first place.  That's the job that FDR's first vice president, John Nance Garner, an irascible Texan, once famously referred to as being not being worth a bucket of warm spit, only he didn't say "spit."

Tom Lehrer, the comedian who wrote and sang truly funny satirical songs in the 1960s, once asked in song what had ever happened to Hubert Humphrey, the senator from Minnesota who became VP under Lyndon Johnson and promptly disappeared from view for four years (until running for president and losing to Richard Nixon):

"Whatever became of Hubert; we miss you so tell us, please
Are you sad, are you cross, are you gathering moss
While you wait for the boss to sneeze? 
Once a fiery liberal spirit
Ah, but now when he speaks he must clear it
Second fiddle's a hard part, I know
When they don't even give you a bow"

That's pretty much what I was thinking, and why the choice of vice-presidential running mates, of so little relevance or impact on the actual elections, is agonized over by the presidential candidates.  Sure, the VP presides over the Senate, but that turns out to be a mostly ceremonial role unless the Senate is split 50-50 by party, which it pretty much never is.

The VP actually has so little to do, and is forced to live in the District of Columbia, which means you are punished for taking a job that entails little other than what the president doesn't have time to get to.  Given the amount of golf and campaigning that the current president has time for, it's no surprise that it's hard to remember that the current vice-president is ... is ... is ... oh yeah, Joe Biden.

Too bad Uncle Joe didn't end up running for president.  He would have had to have told us what he did for the last eight years.

Actually, the previous VP, Dick Cheney, was actually one of the busiest and most productive.  He also worked as VP, apparently only doing what he thought best for the USA and not necessarily what people thought he should do.  A close friend of mine who worked for the second President Bush (43) once told me that Cheney was so active as vice president because "he wasn't ever going to run for president."

I'll be interested to see when we have another VP who makes a whole lot more out of the job.  Last night we heard questions of two men who are taking months out of their lives and careers to run for a job that mostly consists of waiting for the phone to ring.

I don't know the solution; I don't even know if there's a problem.  I just know that if I were made VP tomorrow, I'd insist on living far from Washington as a condition of taking the job.

And that's the truth.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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