The 1960 victory, and LBJ’s smashing national sweep in 1964, however, only postponed a new “Solid South”-one dominated by the Republicans. Johnson (and Lady Bird’s) famous “corn-pone express” train meandered down the southern East Coast and west to Texas, and undoubtedly swayed the vote in many states close to casting off their Democratic moorings. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket probably is the sole instance where the selected vice presidential candidate carried the ticket to victory. Truth was, Johnson had fought for years to shed the perception of him as a Southerner. Kennedy selected Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Texan, who had been the Democrats’ Senate leader and the preferred choice of the South. The sectional model reappeared in an unanticipated, surprising way in 1960 when John F. In 1952, Adlai Stevenson followed the Democrats’ proven sectional model, choosing John Sparkman as his running mate, a quiet, pleasant, obscure Southerner-and segregationist. The tradition proved strong enough for FDR in 1944 to abandon the sitting VP, Henry Wallace, the liberals’ favorite, for Harry Truman, an obscure, border-state senator as his running mate. George Washington, Virginian, would be balanced with a Massachusetts man, and thus emerged a long-prevailing custom. The selection of Adams recognized his faithful service to the new nation more pointedly, it reflected the reality of sectional politics. Thomas Jefferson, our second vice president, on the other hand, found it an “honorable and easy” place, compared to the higher office, which he dubbed “a splendid misery.” And for popular culture, George Gershwin immortalized the unknown Alexander Throttlebottom as the quintessential nominee. Nelson Rockefeller famously dismissed it as “stand-by equipment,” but then like Lord Byron’s lady who said “she’d ne’er consent,” he later consented. Roosevelt’s vice president for his first two terms, John Nance Garner, called the office “a bucket of warm spit” journalistic practice then did not permit his different characterization. The ever-vain Adams wanted to be called “His Excellency,” but the senators, deeply imbued with republican principles, derided him as “His Rotundity.”Īdams left a legacy of disparagement. Our very first vice president, John Adams, at his crankiest, complained that “my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” He worked almost in complete anonymity, except when he had a row over his title while serving as the Senate’s presiding officer (the only constitutionally specific function of the vice presidency). An office once mocked as totally obscure now has become a desirable prize.
Will possible John McCain voters be swayed by an added choice of Mitt Romney, Charles Crist, Bobby Jindal or any other equally insignificant? Some Democrats yearn for Hillary Clinton’s nomination, envisioning an irresistible union of race and gender politics. We have scant evidence that vice presidential nominees influence voters very much. Ye can’t be sint to jail f’r it, but it’s a kind iv a disgrace. Th’ Vice-Prisidincy is th’ next highest an’ th’ lowest. Dooley, the national wit at the turn of the 20th century: “Th’ Presidincy is th’ highest office in th’ gift iv th’ people. Mark Twain once remarked about a man with two sons: One went to sea, the other became vice president, and neither was heard of again. The presidential nominees usually settled on lesser-known figures, deserved obscurities in American history. Hardly anyone knew of the process, if indeed one existed aside from a brief huddle by the presidential candidate with a few advisers and friends.
For two centuries, selecting vice presidential candidates was at best a mere afterthought.
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