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.