The Running Mate Problem

[DonViejo]

Vice presidential candidates have been uneven as the position has gotten more important.

By Robert Schlesinger | Managing Editor
July 22, 2016, at 6:00 a.m.

CLEVELAND — The vice presidency, it's been paraphrased, is not worth a bucket of warm spit. But over the last couple of decades two competing and frankly unsettling trends have occurred around that position.

On the one hand, the vice presidency has gradually gained great currency in recent decades and is worth a sight more now. On the other hand, a disturbing number of aspirants to that office seem better qualified for the old 'bucket' list.

First consider how the role of the vice president has changed. Joel Goldstein, a scholar of the vice presidency and author of "The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden," says that the office has definitely become more important over the last four decades. He pegs the growth to Walter Mondale convincing President Jimmy Carter that the vice president "could be most useful as a general adviser and trouble-shooter, not running a particular program or area. … Carter gave Mondale the resources he needed – access, information, stature, support – and they implemented the vision successfully." That change has accelerated over the last three administrations, Goldstein says over email: "Gore, Cheney and Biden were each arguably the most influential VP, until their successor claimed that title."

But even as the vice presidency has found its proverbial groove, the quality of candidate for the office has not kept pace, especially since George H. W. Bush. He was qualified to follow Mondale, of course, but his own hand-picked successor, Dan Quayle, was famously "no Jack Kennedy." Quayle's four years as the number two were a nothingburger (though in fairness, Goldstein says he was a "valuable legislative and political adviser and operative&quot , for better or worse.

He was succeeded by the well-qualified Al Gore. Then things start to get hairy. Gore tapped Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a conservative Democrat best known to that point for his sanctimonious moralizing during President Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. Eight years later, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate was a featured speaker at the Republican Party's national convention.

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