(With an Added Bonus Regarding Negative Politics)

What follows is an excerpt from a book I sort-of published in the mid-1990’s.  By “sort of”, I mean that it was rejected by some of the finest publishing houses in America because it was too long (560 pages) and had a limited potential market.  The Republican National Committee agreed to take it off our hands (there was a co-author whose name is not revealed to protect his reputation) and we were paid the equivalent of lunch money for each disk sold to potential GOP candidates across the country.

From “In the Trenches” published by Ripon Press.

Successful attacking involves the judicious use of logical fallacies.  Crafty attackers never lie and they never spread vicious rumors.  Rather, they engage in what we call shabby honesty.  … It all depends on how shabby you want to be and the depth of shabbiness tolerated by your electorate.  This varies from region to region.

If you are not willing to be illogical (not immoral, mind you), you’re in the wrong game and public office will forever elude you.  Very few contests feature one candidate who is completely out of character with his district because politically astute people are not, generally, boneheads.

Your disagreements with your opponent will likely be at the margin and political reality demands that you do everything you can to sharpen, highlight, and throw into stark relief those disagreements.  Since your opponent will not oblige you by being a wacko, it is up to you to make him look like a sort-of wacko anyway.  The use of logical fallacies accomplishes this goal.  We call it “shabby honesty” because we abhor attempts to sugarcoat what it is we are about.  If your morals do not permit your indulgence in shabby honesty, we understand.

The most popular fallacy for achieving shabby honesty is the slippery slope argument.  Slippery slopes are hard to detect, frequently true and very convincing.  They are fallacious because they seek to infer an irresistible and causal link between some current horror and projected horrors to follow.  When Atlantic City was debating legal casino gambling, opponents declared that approval would open their fair city to the influence of organized crime.  This argument was fallacious on two counts.  First, it assumed that organized crime was not already in the city, which was ludicrous.  Second, it sought to convince voters that organized crime was caused by legal gambling — a convincing but erroneous argument.  Slippery slope arguments are used to carry your enemy’s issue position to its (il)logical conclusion.

The false choice fallacy is also useful because it simultaneously bolsters your own position while trashing that of the enemy.  “I believe that if we don’t double the number of police cars in our city, crime will mushroom out of control and we’ll be forced to remain behind locked doors (slippery slope added for good measure).”  The choice is false because it assumes, fallaciously, that only two alternatives exist and ignores the fact that many other possible solutions to the problem of crime can be crafted.

One of the most frequently used routes on the path to shabby honesty is the straw man argument.  This fallacy consists of taking your opponent’s views and misrepresenting them slightly.  It is dishonest.  Use it only under the most extreme circumstances because it rarely works.

Oddly, voters don’t get terribly exercised over shabby honesty when they recognize it, passing it off with “Oh, that’s just politics-as-usual.”  We have frequently belittled voters in these pages but they still have the ability to sort out arrant trash in political discourse.  That’s why straw man arguments, if carried to ludicrous ends, will fail.  Slippery slope and false choice attacks are preferred, but only if they are limited to mild extensions of what the opponent really said.  For instance, if the foe has come out in favor of building a new waste treatment plant, you can attack him by calling him a supporter of pork and still be plausible.  If he tries to accuse you of wanting to poison the drinking water of small children, voters will gaze heavenward in disgust.

On the other side of the coin, never permit the tiniest error to mar your own printed or spoken statements.  We have been privileged to sit among some of the most ferocious political killers the world has ever known but none of them would allow the slightest falsehood to issue from their midst.  Within the generous confines of shabby honesty may be found a wealth of weasel words and logical extensions.  Never lie or misquote your opponent because that gives him a large stick with which to beat you about the head and shoulders.

With [a sufficient] quantity of fat in the fire, the media — The Great Mentioner — will elevate your race from “listless” to “heating up” or, better still, to “nasty”.  Even Undecideds will begin to take notice and choose up sides.  Do you think it is a pity that such tactics are necessary to gain press attention?  Wouldn’t it be better if campaigns were conducted on a loftier (or at least less sordid) plane?  Isn’t democracy ill-served when politicians pander so slavishly to that which is meanest in the human spirit?

The answer to all those questions is twofold:  Yes; and so what?

What line of work are you in, after all?  When you signed up to be a candidate, were you under the impression that it would be tea parties and ice cream sociables throughout?  Did not some small portion of your mind warn you that the going might get a little rough?  If it did, you probably thought that you had to be prepared to fend off attacks and never gave a thought to the possibility that you might have to launch them yourself.  My, my, my; what a dirty business politics is.  No wonder people hate it.

Give us a break!  We contend that attack tactics are not only justified by the terms of battle — they are a moral obligation as well.

Somewhere on your list of reasons for seeking office is the hint that you are better able to discharge the office’s duties than your opponent.  You are obliged to share that conviction with voters because to do otherwise would be a disservice to them.  Touting your own worthiness is one way of accomplishing this goal, but it works better if you juxtapose your virtues with the opponent’s failings.  The former method is too subtle and voters often miss subtlety.

We had a client once who was opposing another newcomer for an open seat.  The county was quietly investigating the opponent’s supporters for influence peddling and we were privy to all the details.  It looked like the investigation would not be completed until after the election and our candidate was running behind.  We urged him to reveal the investigation and attack the opponent — something he was morally reluctant to do.  We pointed out that her victory would place into high office a person who was likely in the pocket of unsavory people and that he had an ethical requirement to let voters know what was going on.  He refused.  When the woman was elected, she spent four years doing nothing for her constituents because the investigation resulted in jail terms for some of her supporters.  So tainted was she by their misdeeds that she served only one ineffective term.  The true victims of our client’s refusal to attack were the district’s constituents.

We have little patience with political hand-wringers and editorial bedwetters who weep over the sorry state of political discourse in contemporary America.  Candidates and consultants are held responsible by these misguided do-gooders, mainly because we are easy targets and no one wants to tell the truth — which is that voters demand negative politics.  We are not here to comfort fools with pious words about the sanctity of the process or the collective wisdom of voters.  Here are some unvarnished truths:

• American politics has always been negative and always will be.
• If politics were conducted with the dignity of a Paris art salon, voters would never do their duty.  We are reminded of the story of the farmer whose soft-hearted approach to training mules was known far and wide.  When a visitor asked for a demonstration, the farmer’s first act was to clobber the poor beast with a plank.  “I thought you believed that mules should be trained with kindness”, the shocked visitor said.  “Quite right”, responded the farmer, “But first, you have to get their attention.”  Nothing gets a voter’s attention like a verbal slugfest.
• Many people believe that negative politics is the cause of low voter turnout.  In fact, negative politics has kept turnout from falling to even lower levels.  Non-voters say they avoid discharging their civic obligation because of “dirty politics” and the presence of two evils on the ballot, but most of them are fibbing.
• The people who deplore negative campaigning are of two types.  The first is usually a newspaper writer who mistakenly believes that voters are just as fascinated with political issues as he is.  They are not.  75% of the American people are bored silly by the whole thing.  The second type is the doe-eyed reformer who believes that the Biblical injunction “Come, let us reason together” applies regardless of whether your opponent is a reasonable man with different views or a downright thug with no respect for people’s rights and privileges.
• Please don’t compare our politics with the saintly methods used elsewhere.  This is America, for heaven’s sake.  This is the place where two men would stand in the middle of a western street and play “fastdraw”, the object of which was to kill the opponent.  We tolerate a crime rate that is several orders of magnitude higher than any other nation having a working government.  Moderation is alien to our national character — we thrive on extremes and would rather select from Right and Wrong than learn about complicated policy alternatives.
• Politicians and their advisors will never change the attitudes of voters in this regard because we are required to appeal to voters on their terms, not ours. Politicians are no more responsible for the low estate of public debate than Delta Airlines is for cloudy skies.  Both have to operate in the area nature has assigned.
• Americans do grow weary of the constant bickering today, just as they wearied of it when Andrew Jackson was President.  But we are the most successful free nation in the history of the planet.  America has one of the oldest governments in the world, largely because we weed out the political Milquetoasts early in the process and fight each other with harsh words rather than bullets (false choice).
• Those who believe that we are going to hell in a handbasket because candidates behave in an ungentlemanly fashion, should get off their couch-crenilated keesters and run for office themselves.  Let them find out first-hand how easy it is to bore a voter and how infinitely preferable it is to arouse him instead.  If we are pursuing bad policies, it is not because the process is flawed, it is because voters frequently want to have their cake and eat it too.  To believe otherwise is worse than shooting the messenger — it’s shooting the piece of paper the message is written on.

Pant, pant, pant.

Politics does not demand of her practitioners that they shed their virtue as a price of entry.  If a politician behaves like a vicious, snarling beast it is not because he is a politician, but, rather, because he is a vicious, snarling beast and has always been one.  Mississippi’s late (and unlamented) Senator Bilbo was a racist tub-thumper without elected peer, not because politics forced him to, but because he was a genuinely despicable human being.

Here’s an old joke most of us have heard:

Q:    How can you tell when politicians are lying?
A:    Their lips are moving.

Here’s not-a-joke that most people don’t know:

Q:    Why do politicians lie?
A:    Because voters will not tolerate truth from politicians.

Bear with me as I take a somewhat roundabout way of demonstrating my point.

While it may not enjoy the status of a logical fallacy, it is, nevertheless, a case of faulty reasoning to assume that other people, most people or any people view the world as you do and share your goals and ambitions.  This was driven home to me in the late 1970’s when I offered a keypunch operator (those younger than 40 may have to look up this term) an opportunity for professional advancement.  Her response was that she had quit her previous job because they forced her to leave keypunching and do something else.  I realized that, simply because I was ambitious and regarded keypunching as the worst job on the entire planet, it did not follow that my employee saw things as I did.

Along the same line, during my 22-year career as a political consultant, I learned how to disassociate myself from reality and view the political world as most voters see it.

• It’s boring.  On rare occasions voters perceive that their personal hides may be at stake in the outcome of an election (1932 – Hoover v Roosevelt and 2008 are strong contenders) but our system of government is so successful that this level of fear is rare.
• It’s time-consuming.  Politics forces people to attend to matters that require something more than room-temperature IQ’s and compels them to spend precious time away from their childrens’ educations, professional advancement, domestic harmony and re-runs of The Survivor.  Most voters perceive this investment in Time as a fairly comprehensive waste of same.  I am known as a champion of this attitude and have frequently advised people that no election is as important as their child’s parent-teacher conference.  I agree with the sentiment expressed by the late Eugene McCarthy, “Being good at politics is like being good at football:  you have to be smart enough to do it well, and dumb enough to think it’s important”.
• It doesn’t matter.  The relative lack of participation in elections is evidence that most people simply aren’t interested and are sufficiently secure that they can afford to ignore it.  After all, when was the last time someone was executed for voting for the wrong person?  At the other extreme, they feel a sense of helplessness so profound that participation in elections seems, to them, an utter waste of time.  If asked to list what is personally important to most Americans, politics would probably rank below any professional sports venue, the martial woes of Brad Pitt and the threat of a new Wall-Mart in their community.

When a politician gussies himself up for an engagement with his particular polity, the primary rule in force is that American voters select AGAINST politicians.  Therefore, every  time he opens his mouth and allows a fixed opinion to fall out, he is providing some segment of the electorate with sufficient reason to vote for the other guy.  He can do nothing himself to retrieve the lost votes; the best he can hope for is that his opponent will utter something even more offensive and hand them back.  That’s why your average, disconnected voter perceives elections as the lesser of two evils.  The fact of the matter is that the only person with whom he is in 100% agreement is himself and he isn’t running.

I never attempted to tell my candidate clients what their opinion on various issues should be – that would be pointless and offensive.  Instead, I totted-up the “political cost” of any given position.  Most of them were local candidates and grappled with heart-stoppers like potholes, traffic congestion, property taxes, local crime, land use, education and scandal.  If my client pronounced herself fully in support of as much graft and scandal as possible, I could inform her that 100% of the electorate disagreed with her and would likely support our opponent.  (Nevertheless, I know of one candidate who was convicted of stealing from a church charity fund and still received 17% of the primary vote.)

Be patient a bit longer.  Public opinion polls frequently “kitchen test” issue positions to determine the electorates’ collective opinion.  Here is another truism of politics:  As the split among voters on a particular issue approaches 50 : 50, the usefulness of that issue diminishes proportionally because equal numbers of voters are alike attracted and disaffected by any given opinion.  Likewise, as the split approaches 0 : 100, its usefulness diminishes because only a knothead would advocate something that the vast majority of the electorate condemns.  The most useful issues split the electorate somewhere between 60 : 40 and 75 : 25 and astute candidates must be on the high end to succeed.

One more building block.  Political professionals use models of voter behavior much as economists model economic behavior.  The models are useless in any attempt to predict the vote of any individual voter, but they are quite useful in predicting the behavior of a mass of voters.  Like most social science models, they utilize absolutes; thus, the capitalist model in economics assumes perfect price knowledge for both buyers and sellers.  This does not exist in the real world, but its presence in the model serves to eliminate those annoying instances of individual idiocy (or wisdom) which render models less useful.  Part of the political model assumes that voters want everything that government can provide and wish to pay nothing for it.  This applies to all political matters, regardless of monetary cost.  Voters want perfect roads at no cost.  They want to maintain legal abortion without the unpleasant reality of abortion.  Murderers must be executed without anyone actually pulling the switch.  Welfare, the rescue of abducted children, drug abuse elimination and national health care must be achieved without dipping into any particular voter’s wallet.

The calculus of the matter works like this:  If politician A tells voter B that objective C cannot be achieved without a pound of flesh from taxpayer D (or B), then politician A is toast.  On the other hand, if politician X tells voters that objective Y can be achieved at a price of Z(ero), he will sail on to electoral victory.  This is a useful model – not a perfect description.  It is also a lie – one that voters respond to with votes.

Voters, collectively, will not tolerate truth from politicians.  Voters want to be told sweet, sweet lies.  Voters were gung-ho about kicking Saddam Hussein out of Iraq until they realized that American lives would have to be spent in the effort and, perhaps, for a considerable time going forward.  They like low interest rates when they borrow money but loathe them when they live on fixed incomes.  Americans want traffic safety but cannot abide traffic signal cameras that photograph them when they run one.  We want absolute security and absolute privacy; medications that are 100% guaranteed, gold-plated and copper-bottomed at a price of less than $1.00 per dozen;  a legal system that incarcerates all actual and potential felons without offending any of them or inconveniencing any of us.  We want to drive SUVs, pay less than $2.00 per gallon to gas them up and breathe pristine-pure air.  We want to increase spending on (take your pick) the military, education, social welfare, the environment, health care, senior citizens, young people, the middle class, the poor, everyone, without increasing taxes or reducing funds for any of the others.

As a mass, voters are idiots and politicians rightfully treat them as such.  They will not deal with you as adults until you reason and behave as adults.  Until then, the lies will continue because the market (spelled Y-O-U) demand them.

In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale confronted incumbent Republican Ronald Reagan.  Mondale said that, if elected, he would raise taxes to counter the staggering deficits of Reagan.  He also said that Reagan would raise taxes but was not sufficiently honest to tell voters so during the campaign.  Mondale suffered the worst defeat of any Democratic candidate in history and Reagan raised taxes in his second administration.

American voters are suckers.  Politicians will continue to lie until you express (through actual ballots – not opinion polls)  a desire to behave rationally.  How we do it is detailed in part two of this essay.  It is ridiculously simple and cost-effective.

Everyone is talking about the undecided voter. As I write this, I’m watching a line graph on CNN track the impressions of “uncommitted Ohio voters.”

I’m pretty sure my father has already made this point, but I’ll reiterate: if you don’t know who you’re going to vote for by now, you don’t possess enough philosophical sophistication to justify participation in the democratic process.

I cite Family Guy to make my point:

FrontPage Magazine has just run an article about ETSU’s Society for Intellectual Diversity. Yours truly features prominantly. Check it out.

[9:57] Obama is talking about my “right” to health care (McCain may have referred to it that way as well - I can’t remember). I want someone to provide for me the philosophical basis of that assertion. Tell me why we ought to tack “health care” on to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (or property - I’ve always been partial to Locke) and not “a new Lexus.”

[9:43] Watching the debate now… Watching a sarcastic, irritated Tom Brokaw deal with long-winded politicians is the best part.

SNL lampoons the mortgage crisis:

I have a bone to pick with individuals who teach statistics.

A standard deviation is a measure of the average distance between data points and their mean. Thus, if one’s dataset contained the numbers 2, 4, 6, and 8, the mean would be 20/4 = 5 (the sum divided by the number of data points). A standard deviation would be a measure of the average difference between each point - 2, 4, 6, and 8 - and the mean, 5.

The formula is, therefore, as follows:

Seems straightforward, right? But there are a couple of oddities: First, why “n-1″ as opposed to “n”? I have seen proofs which justify this peculiarity, and am quite confident that no amount of time, energy, and chemical stimulants could ever allow me to understand what the hell is going on. So I’m content to let that one go. And to their credit, every stats prof. I’ve had has always been fairly upfront with the class on this question: “it’s just better” is a pretty standard summation. (The only variation I’ve ever heard is that the -1 “stands in for the mean” …that is, if every number in the set were the same, there could be no standard deviation, and the -1 exists to account for this… It didn’t make any sense when I first heard it, and it doesn’t now, either.)

My beef is with the second oddity: the entire formula is tucked under a radical; that is, the final step in the calculatory process is to take the final figure and get its square root. The question “why?” naturally follows, and the answer seems fine at first glance: it’s because the distance of each data point from the mean will necessarily produce negative figures, and squaring those differences gets rid of that pesky negative sign. Thus, one must calculate the square root of the final figure in order to “undo” the squaring of each previously squared distance from the mean. (Incidentally, the figure prior to this final step is referred to as the “variance,” which is useful in other scenarios, but represents essentially the same thing as the standard deviation… and if you’re a statistician who wants to e-mail me and tell me why that’s incorrect… please don’t).

Spot the trouble yet? I’ll go on…

My occasionally stubborn, often bizarre, 10-year-homeschooled brain immediately jumps to a question: rather than going through the whole squaring/square root rigamarole, why not just drop the sign? Take the absolute value of each distance from the mean and be done with it. In addition to being simpler, this corrects for the fact that the square root of the sum of squares is not equal to the sum of the square root of each individual squared distance from the mean. Math just doesn’t work that way (more on this later).

Think of it this way : let’s say we have four numbers, 2, 4, 5, and 9. Their mean is 5. Their sum of squares is 26. Twenty-six divided by 3 (remember, we’re using n-1) is 8.67, the square root of which is 2.94, which is the standard deviation of 2, 4, 5 and 9 using the above formula. However, if we use the absolute values of each data point’s distance from the mean, as mentioned above, things change. The sum of those values (3, 1, 0, and 4) is 8. Dividing 8 by 3 (remember, n-1…) gives us 2.67. Like I said: this is not the same thing as the standard deviation. So that whole “undoing the squaring” thing is just plain wrong.

It is my understanding that Sir Ronald Fischer, in his infinite wisdom, has produced a lengthy piece explaining, in great detail, why standard deviation is superior to “mean deviation” - what we got by using absolute values (2.67). Seeing as Fischer is widely considered to be the father of modern statistics, I’m willing to accept that he’s right and that years of review by people much smarter than I have essentially proven this to be the case.

…or this could just be because Fischer was an insufferable asshole with whom nobody cared to argue (I think Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky have also adopted this tactic). Either way, I don’t care to question him.

My point - and yes, I do have one - is related to the way we teach statistics (thus, the title of this post): Statistics instructors should stop telling their students that taking the square root of the sum of squares divided by n-1 “undos” the squaring of each data point’s distance from the mean! It’s confusing! And statistics is confusing enough, damnit!

Moreover, I should like to point out that when I have inquired about this discrepency in the past, I was invariably met with a look which can only be described as “huh?” Not only does the question seem to be rejected prima facie simply because it’s the accepted method (knowing the inner workings of statistical techniques is not always a good thing, and is almost never necessary), but the notion that taking the square root of a sum of squares does not produce the same figure as the sum each individual number by itself has been, on multiple occasions, been met with disbelief.

Don’t believe me? 25+25+25+25 = 100. The square root of 100 is 10. However, 5+5+5+5 = 20.

And 20 is not 10. At least not yet.

…but ask me again on Nov. 5th.

Among the many virtues of Governor Palin is her willingness - if not eagerness - to self-identify as a feminist.

I realize that the term causes no small amount of discomfort for most conservatives, and many libertarians; this is understandable, as feminism’s extreme genera are responsible for more intellectual atrocities than I can count (here’s a tip, kids: when an ideological movement starts inventing “alternative” epistomologies, claiming that the scientific method is somehow phalically tainted, run like hell). However, the more liberal varieites of feminism are to be lauded: at its most basic level, feminism can be defined as the belief that men and women are of equal moral value. Methinks one would be hard-pressed to find anyone from any mainstream ideological persuasion who would argue otherwise.

With that settled, let us turn to Palin’s left-wing, feminist detractors. Their claim is, simply put, that it is impossible for one to be both a feminist and pro-life simultaneously; that the two labels are, in a sense, mutually exclusive. (As a side note: I hear the same type of thing from my fundamentalist Christian friends, who occasionally inform me that I cannot simultaneously believe in human evolution and seek salvation through Jesus Christ.) As a colleague of mine recently put it, “how can you believe that feminism is about choice while at the same time denying women the right to choose what to do with their bodies?” This is a common argument, often followed by the all-too-predictable “if you don’t believe abortion is morally acceptable, don’t have one.”

As a libertarian, I am immediately sympathetic to arguments which rest on individual sovereignty and self-ownership; in fact, I have often made a similar argument regarding the legal prohibition of narcotics: if you don’t like drugs, don’t do any. But when applied to abortion, this type of argument misses the point entirely.

As is the case with almost all individuals in the pro-life camp, Palin’s position on abortion rests firmly on her belief that life begins at conception. Thus, a fertilized embryo has the same intrinsic value as do I. Putting aside for a moment the empirical, theological and philosophical considerations surrounding this belief, let us consider its implications: if life begins at conception, anyone terminating a pregnancy is by definition committing murder. Thus, the aforementioned argument - from Palin’s perspective - can be translated as follows: “if you don’t believe in murder, don’t kill anyone.”

The inherrent absurdity of this allegory needs no elaboration. My point can be summed up by noting that in order to be logically consistent, anyone who believes that life begins at conception and opposes murder is logically obligated to oppose abortion as well. This truism stands without any reference to the rights of women or feminism.

Of course, if a person believes (as I do) that life does not begin at conception, things become much more complicated. While most Christians cite various Biblical passages as evidence of their beliefs on the subject, a discussion of Biblical hermeneutics is well beyond the scope of the present post. If one wishes to knock down the pro-life argument by discussing the ontological properties of an individual human life, they can be my guest. But at its core - at least for people like Sarah Palin - abortion has nothing at all to do with feminism. Those in the pro-choice camp would do well to recognize this fact.

While I’m almost certain this point has been made elsewhere, having failed to hear it in the general press, I am compelled to make it here: the only reason anybody has taken notice of Sarah Palin’s daughter, her husband’s tryst with the Alaskan Independence Party, or her dismissal of Walter Monegan is because no one has ever heard of her. Her lack of perfection is a function of her homo sapien status rather than an indicator of some moral failing.

I hasten to point out that there has been little mention of the fact that Joe Biden is a known plaigerist who once referred to his current running mate as “clean and well-spoken”. But this is not the result of Biden’s scruples or even media bias - it’s due to the fact that anyone who follows politics is already aware of Biden’s tainted past.

Moreover, with respect to the first two complaints - her daughter’s pregnancy and her husband’s former party affiliation - it seems to me that directing criticism toward Palin’s family rather than the woman herself is an indicator of pure desperation on the part of Palin’s detractors. If the worst thing you can say about the woman is that her daughter has engaged in premarital coitus and her husband was once a member of an obscure and controversial political party, well… I think that speaks for itself.

And with respect to Walter Monegan: let us assume the worst - that Palin dismissed him because he refused to fire Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten, who was in the process of divorcing Palin’s sister. Can anyone really blame her, given the conditions? Wooten’s favorite pastimes include brazen violations of the laws he has sworn to enforce, including making death threats and driving while intoxicated (in his squad car, no less). Were I in her position - regardless of whether or not I had a beef with an involved party - I would have requested that the sonofabitch be fired, too, and would have raised holy hell if a member of my cabinet refused to do so.

Speaking of myself: were I to run for political office, is there any doubt that my opponents would make good use of this very web site, dredging up writings from my mispent, ill-informed youth as evidence of my ignorance and temerity? I’m quite certain they would. But make no mistake - these kinds of revelations can be controversial only once per forum, and with respect to Sarah Palin, the Democrats have used up all their rounds.

It ain’t worth a pitcher of warm piss!*
- John Nance Garner, VP under FDR

[* The media in the 1940's were unable to print this pithy quote verbatim and substituted “spit” for “piss”. The quote is repeated accurately but, frankly, I like “spit” better.]

The nation waited with ‘bated breath to learn whom Barak Obama would select to serve as his Vice Presidential candidate for the upcoming race for the White House. We Americans believe that the choice says something about the nominee himself and – never forget – the veep is but one heartbeat away from hearing Hail to the Chief played ad nauseum for his very own self.

The Vice Presidency is one of the world’s most awkward jobs. The powers inherent in the post are enshrined in the constitution and total exactly two. The first is to preside over the Senate. That task in itself is less exciting than that experienced by tourists to the upper house. The wise men and women who designed these sojourns limit the experience to less than half an hour lest the Capitol’s medical services become overwhelmed by comatose visitors. Even so, few veeps spend much time executing this awesome prerogative since the Senate has its own rules for conducting business and those rules give scant attention to the Executive branch’s unwelcome, albeit constitutionally-mandated, intruder.

Vice Presidents have no vote in the Senate unless that body is tied, in which case the veep casts the deciding vote in whichever direction his master in the Oval Office dictates. On this and related points let there be no doubt – the Vice President’s opinion may or (more likely) may not be sought, but the Vice President is the President’s factotum first, last and always. The constitutional job description is all well and good, but the unwritten one has a single requirement; “Do as you’re told”.

The Constitution also commands the Vice President to conduct the joint session of Congress when the electoral college votes are officially tabulated and the next President and Vice President selected. In January, 2001 Vice President Al Gore carried out this task. Many in the Congress believed that Gore had been robbed of his destiny in the recently concluded election and voiced protests against the casting of Florida’s and Texas’s electoral votes. The situation presented many opportunities for mischief but Mr. Gore eschewed them all. Each objection was quietly ruled out of order and the count proceeded to his ultimate and official undoing. Vice President Gore understood the vital importance of the rule of law when transferring power from one party to another in America and did not flinch from his no-doubt painful duty. For this, if nothing else, he has earned the nation’s gratitude.

Once there were two brothers. One went away to sea; the other was elected Vice President. And nothing was heard of either of them again. Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President.

Vice Presidents have one other function, that of standing next in line to the presidency. This is, perhaps, the most awkward aspect of the job. George H. W. Bush’s Vice President, Dan Quayle, said that the primary job of the Vice President is to “be prepared”. I note snorts and guffaws from the peanut gallery regarding this particular veep’s ability to carry out his self-described function, but who is to say that a golf course is not the best place to prepare for it.

The Constitution states that the Vice President shall assume the duties of the President should the President die or otherwise be unable to discharge the duties of the office. The clause received its first test in 1841 when President William Henry Harrison succumbed to a lethal case of foolish vanity. “Old Tippecanoe”, the oldest President up to that time, wanted to exhibit his vitality and delivered a brain-mugging two-hour inaugural address while standing in a cold rain without an overcoat. He caught a sniffle as a result and died of pneumonia a month later. Vice President John Tyler (“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!”) insisted that the constitution compelled him to BE the President, not just act like one and he took the oath of office the day after Harrison’s expiry. His precedent guided eight other Vice Presidents so elevated throughout our nation’s history, and was only made part of the constitution in 1967 with the passage of the 25th amendment.

The Founders left it to Congress to determine succession in the absence of a Vice President. The Presidential Succession Act of 1792 was the first attempt to do so – passed while our first President, George Washington, was still in his first term. The Act named the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House as the follow-up prez in that order. When Chester A. Arthur ascended to the presidency after James Garfield’s assassination, there was a brief period when there was neither a veep, nor a President pro tempore nor a Speaker of the House of Representatives. Given the circumstances, whenever Arthur went out of town he always left an envelope on his desk addressed to “The President”, assuming that someone would pick it up and read it.

When Grover Cleveland’s first Vice President, Thomas Hendricks, died in the second year of Cleveland’s first term, the President asked Congress to revise the 1792 Act. The 1886 Act pulled the President pro tempore and the Speaker out of the line and replaced them with Cabinet officials, starting with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury. The idea was that Senators and Representatives might be of either party but the Cabinet, at least, was loyal to the late President and his legacy should not be tampered with. In 1947 the Act was revised again and the Speaker and President pro tempore were put back in (in reverse order this time). By this point, the idea was that the office of the President ought to be filled by some person who had actually been elected by some voters somewhere to some Federal office. Cabinet officials are next in line in roughly the order in which their cabinet offices were created.

To-date, no one other than the Vice President has ever assumed the office of President but there have been some near-misses. In 1849 the constitutionally-required date to start Zachary Taylor’s administration was March 4 which fell on a Sunday. President-elect Taylor refused to be sworn in on the Sabbath. A fellow named David Rice Atchison’s tombstone claims that he was “President for one day” — March 4, 1849 because, it was claimed, he was President pro tempore on the day preceding that particular Sunday. However, Senator Atchison’s claim to that office had also expired on March 4th. When President Andrew Johnson was being tried in the Senate after being impeached by the House, President pro tempore Wade Hampton was in the enviable position of being able to vote for his own elevation to the Presidency by removing Johnson. Sadly for Wade, Johnson was exonerated by a single vote (not Hampton’s).

“I do not intend to be buried until I am dead.” Daniel Webster, when offered the nomination.

Many a man has been raised to the highest office without any preparation for the task, most notably, Harry Truman. Here is a curiosity. By the time the Democrats replaced Vice President Henry Wallace with Vice Presidential nominee Truman in July of 1944, President Roosevelt was already a gravely sick man. In fact, many behind-the-scenes maneuvers in Truman’s behalf were inspired by fears that Wallace was too far to the left and his probable ascension to the Oval Office would be catastrophic for the party. I have never read an historical account of President Truman – including David McCullough’s excellent one – which gives any hint that “Give-’em-Hell-Harry” was anything less than thunderstruck by the President’s demise and his own elevation. I find the whole premise preposterous.

“My country has, in its wisdom, contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” John Adams

The Constitution originally placed into the V P’s office that person who had garnered the second-highest number of votes in the electoral college. This worked well for the first two elections because Vice President John Adams and President George Washington were both Federalists. When Washington declined to seek the office for a third term, the nation set about choosing his replacement and Mr. Adams was in an admirable position to secure it. By this time, an anti-Federalist coalition had formed around Washington’s Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who challenged Adams for the top spot and came in second.

Thus, our second President was saddled with his major opponent occupying the number two job in the country. The office held no particular power even then, but, if it was not a bully pulpit, it was still a pretty swell one. Jefferson lost no time in making Adams’ single term miserable. Our nation’s fourth election, in 1800, found Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican allies in fine fettle to defeat their Federalist enemies. Defeating each other was a different matter.

Poor old John Adams. The guiding brilliance behind American independence, stout defender of the Constitution, our second President and inaugural holder of America’s most worthless office came in third when the electoral votes were counted in January, 1801. Perhaps he took some solace in the fact that Jefferson, his main rival, had been hoist upon his own petard in the form of his political ally, Aaron Burr of New York. When the electoral college votes were cast, Jefferson and Burr were tied. Accordingly, the selection of the nation’s third President passed to the House of Representatives where the party of Adams still held a majority.

Catapulting their third-place President back into the White House was beyond their constitutional powers, but they still had the ability to deny the top spot to whichever of their enemies they deemed most pernicious. Washington’s Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton (who could not seek the highest office because he was not a native-born American), despised Jefferson for political reasons, but loathed his fellow New Yorker, Burr, for political AND personal reasons. Jefferson was selected President on the 36th ballot in the House due to Hamilton’s persuasive argument that Jefferson was bad, but Burr was HORRIBLE. Burr became Vice President and was estranged from Jefferson (who thought that Burr, in the interest of party harmony, should have withdrawn from the contest in the House), and soon thereafter killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Hamilton became a martyr and Burr became a rascal.

The rank untidiness of the 1800 election prompted passage of the 12th amendment in 1804. It required separate votes from the electoral college for President and Vice President. This assured that no future President would have his chief rival one heartbeat away from ultimate power. It also generated the now-familiar practice of Presidential candidates selecting a running mate and the two seeking election in tandem.

One other remarkable thing transpired after passage of the 12th amendment – something most political pundits and even politicians don’t seem to notice. Historically, being the Vice President is a lousy way to become President in a future election. Only two men have moved, via subsequent election, from the Vice Presidency to the Presidency; Democrat Martin Van Buren in 1837 and Republican George H. W. Bush in 1989. Nine other Veeps have served as President after the death or resignation of the President. Of these nine, only four succeeded in winning reelection in their own right (Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson). The other five (John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arther and Gerald Ford) were not reelected.

Obama has made his choice, rejecting a newly-minted Governor of Virginia and a B-O-O-R-I-N-G Senator from Indiana. Other worthies were bypassed including, curiously, a conservative Georgia ex-Senator – Sam Nunn – whose name inspires awe and hand-over-the-heart expressions of patriotism from those in the military-industrial complex. Veep candidates are frequently able to carry their home states for the home team, thus Obama may have punted Virginia, Indiana and Georgia to secure the international relations reputation of the senior Senator from Delaware – Joe Biden.

Joe first ran for the White House in 1988 but his campaign was undone by a combination of opposition skulduggery, Gary Hart’s blood in the water and the subsequent media feeding frenzy. Gary was playing “hide the sausage” with Donna Rice and the media’s exposure of the tryst was, in their eyes, a coup second only to Watergate. Shortly after Hart’s mutilated corpse bobbed to the surface, Mike Dukakis’s campaign manager, Larry Sabato, secretly leaked to the press that Biden was plagiarizing a well-known passage from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, in his own standard stump speech. Furthermore, he had a videotape of what was probably the ONLY time Joe had ever uttered Neil’s words without duly crediting the source. Joe was roadkill and followed Gary into ignominy shortly thereafter. In the fine American tradition of devouring our own children, some snitch whispered to the media that Sabato was the source of Biden’s downfall and Dukakis was forced to fire him. Dukakis then lost the general election. I have often, when faced with equally-unpalatable choices, wished that all could lose. The events of 1988 provided all-too-rare gratification.

But what of Hillary, and New York. Well, New York was never at any risk of supporting John McCain and, if she was even offered the job, Ms. Clinton was wise to reject it. To begin with, it’s tough, emotionally, to go from early sure-thing to ultimate second banana. Second, Hillary really doesn’t do anything politically for Obama that he can’t procure elsewhere – say some middle-aged white (almost) southerner with a record in foreign policy and defense matters.

No one should doubt for a minute that Senator Clinton has abandoned all hope of the White House, but service as President Obama’s go-fer would have degraded her political persona rather than enhance it. History is clear that veeps rarely inherit the laurels of their predecessors but frequently take on their liabilities.

Finally, using her political base in New York and the Senate, Hillary can provide useful leadership in the upper house to advance President Obama’s agenda. Should he falter in his first term, she will be in an even better position to secure the nomination in 2012 than she was this year. Even if she has to wait until 2016, she will not be the oldest candidate ever to seek the office – in fact, she will be 69 years old.

The same age as John McCain in 2008.