A First in Presidential Politics

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"Let me just say, first of all, that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy."

Rep. Geraldine Ferraro
Oct. 11, 1984

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Thirty years ago tonight, a woman participated in a vice presidential debate for the first time.

Actually, that isn't really as impressive as it sounds. There had been only one vice presidential debate prior to that — between then–Sen. Walter Mondale and then–Sen. Bob Dole in 1976. If Geraldine Ferraro had not been a participant, the debate probably never would have garnered the attention it did.

But it was part of the historic nature of the 1984 campaign. Ferraro, after all, was the first woman to be nominated to a major party's national ticket. Minor parties had nominated women before, but few of them managed to win even 1% of the popular vote. Most were mere footnotes in the annals of presidential politics. Even the first women to seek a major party's presidential nomination — Republican Margaret Chase Smith in 1964 and Democrat Shirley Chisholm in 1972 — were treated more as oddities than legitimate candidates.

Conventional wisdom holds that, in any election, a Democrat can count on winning one–third of the vote, a Republican can count on winning one–third of the vote, and the election will be decided by what that final one–third — the undecided, the uninformed and the easily swayed — choose to do. Consequently, Ferraro knew she would receive more votes for a national office than any woman before her — although, as it turned out, the Democrats lost that last one–third of the vote by a wide margin.

Conventional wisdom also holds that most people don't vote for the running mate. They vote for the candidate at the top of the ticket.

Now, personally, I have never been a big fan of vice presidential debates. What is there to debate? Vice presidents don't make policy. In fact, it is only in the last 40 years that the vice president has been treated as a legitimate and contributing member of the executive branch — but the transition has been a work in progress. Vice presidents still serve, as they always have, as the designated national representatives at foreign weddings and funerals. Vice presidents also preside over the Senate and cast votes when needed to break ties.

(That is why the distinction is made in this year's midterm elections that Republicans need to control 51 seats to take over the Senate whereas the Democrats need to control 50 seats. The decisive vote in a tie in the Senate belongs to the party in the White House because the vice president presides over the Senate.)

Otherwise, their chief responsibility is to stay awake during tedious Senate debates, even if they are battling jet lag from having just returned from a funeral halfway around the world.

But if vice presidential debates focused only on those experiences that qualify a person to be vice president, no one would tune in. After all, who wants to hear people talk for 90 minutes about their experience attending funerals or weddings or how they managed to stay awake through tedious legislative debates?

So vice presidential debates focus on issues that presidents are able to influence — sometimes — and other times are not able to influence. In short, a vice presidential debate is predicated on the assumption that one of the participants will one day become president, by assassination or election or maybe even resignation, and, consequently, it is necessary to know the candidates' views on abortion and guns.

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Actually, the notion that it is inevitable that a vice president will one day be president is absurd. Forty–seven men have served as vice president; fourteen went on to become president. That's less than 30% — and most of them became president following the death of the incumbent. It is by no means certain that they would have been elected president on their own. Five only served out their predecessors' unexpired terms, then faded into obscurity. Only four (that's less than 9%) were elected to the presidency without the benefit of having ascended after the death or resignation of someone else — and two of them were elected before presidential elections started involving a popular vote in the early 19th century.

The vice presidency simply never has been the stepping stone to the presidency that you might think it would be.

Many vice presidents have gone on to seek the presidency on their own. Many failed to win their party's nominations — and all who did win the nomination after 1836 and before 1988 were defeated (with the exception of 1968, when Richard Nixon, running as a former vice president, won both the Republican nomination and the general election).

George H.W. Bush, of course, had sought the presidency before — in 1980, he had been Ronald Reagan's top rival for the Republican presidential nomination before being chosen to be Reagan's running mate. Ferraro, however, never had sought the presidency. She had barely sought the House seat she occupied, having won three terms, and was barely known outside her district.

So why was it important? It was important for Democrats to keep the momentum going after Mondale's first debate with Reagan. The polls showed the Democratic ticket trailing the Republican ticket by a wide margin — correctly, too, as it turned out — and the Democrats' hopes for victory depended on a perception of sustained momentum.

Bush's objective was simple — halt the Democrats' momentum, then Reagan could close the deal in the rematch with Mondale later that month.

My memory of that night is that neither candidate was the clear winner — which, in some ways, was a victory for Bush because it supported opposition arguments that the Democrats' momentum had stalled. If Bush had been the clear loser, the Democrats would have had momentum decisively on their side when Mondale faced Reagan in their second and final debate a week and a half later. But the absence of a clear winner changed the conversation.

For the next couple of decades, women were frequently mentioned as potential running mates for presumptive nominees — but such talk was mostly to appease women voters. A vice presidential debate has been part of every presidential election since 1984, but Ferraro remained the only member of the club of major–party female nominees for almost a quarter of a century.

It was a week shy of 24 years later — on Oct. 3, 2008 — that a female nominee participated in another vice presidential debate. That was the day that then–Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the first female nominee on a Republican ticket, and then–Sen. Joe Biden met in their only debate of the 2008 campaign.

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Once again, the conclusion was that the debate had been a draw. As nearly as I could tell, the 2008 vice presidential debate, like the one in 1984, had no influence on the outcome of the race.

The First Unelected Vice President

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On this day 40 years ago, the vice presidency had been vacant for only a couple of days.

The former vice president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned, and there was much speculation about the identity of his replacement.

My family, as I have mentioned here before, was living in Nashville. My father was on a four–month sabbatical, and, on this day in 1973, we were roughly halfway through our time there. My parents decided that the family needed to get away for the weekend, and Oct. 12 in 1973 was on a Friday so, when my brother and I finished school for the day, my family loaded up our car and went somewhere that was about a two–hour drive from Nashville.

I don't remember where we went. It was some sort of rustic lodge–like compound on a body of water, probably a lake, and I seem to remember you could fish there, but, even though my father knew how to fish, I have no memory of him fishing that weekend.

That may have been because it rained most of that weekend. And my memory is that my mother and father and brother and I spent most of the weekend in that cabin watching TV when we weren't at the window watching the rain.

(We probably called that the "Goodloe luck," of which I have written before. It was our version of Murphy's law, I suppose; most of my memories of the "Goodloe luck" do seem to include rain spoiling camping trips and weekend getaways. So it was on that day in 1973.)

My most vivid memory is of that Friday night — 40 years ago tonight — when President Nixon came on TV to announce that he was nominating Gerald Ford to fill the vice presidential vacancy. And I remember the four of us watching him make that announcement.

It was an historic occasion, the first time the 25th Amendment, which clarified presidential succession, was invoked. It was also, as historian Theodore H. White wrote, "a ceremony marked by a tasteless cheerfulness." With so much suspicion and uncertainty swirling around him in October 1973, Nixon seemed oddly detached when he announced Ford's nomination. I honestly think that, on that day, he believed that he would serve the rest of his term, that he would beat the rap.

As I wrote here a couple of years ago, the language of Article II of the Constitution was ambiguous on the subject of presidential succession, saying that, in the event of a vacancy (either temporary or permanent) in the presidency, the vice president should "act as [p]resident ... until the [d]isability be removed, or a president shall be elected."

Presidential succession apparently wasn't a pressing concern for the Founding Fathers. It was first put to the test about half a century after the Constitution was written when President William Henry Harrison died and his vice president, John Tyler, interpreted the Constitution and determined that he should be the actual president, not an acting president, and he took the oath of office, setting a precedent that was followed for more than a century.

But in 1967 the 25th Amendment was ratified, establishing a clear line of succession. And one of its provisions was that, in the event of a vacancy in the vice presidency, the president had to nominate a successor whose name would be sent to Congress for its approval.

Agnew's resignation was the first opportunity for a president to nominate a vice president under the amendment. When Lyndon Johnson became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the vice presidency was vacant for more than a year, but then it was filled by Hubert Humphrey, who was Johnson's running mate in the 1964 election — and, thus, the office was occupied when the 25th Amendment was adopted.

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And, on that night, we watched as all three networks covered Nixon's announcement that he wanted Gerald Ford to be his new vice president.

Only one other time since that day — nearly a year later, when Ford had to choose his own successor following Nixon's resignation — has a president been called upon to nominate someone to fill a vice presidential vacancy.

As unpopular as Nixon was at that time, I really believe that few, if any, people who watched him introduce Ford as Agnew's successor realized they were looking at the man who would be president within a year.

Fewer still probably realized we would witness the nomination of another unelected vice president within a year — and then not see it happen again for at least four decades.

That is how history works sometimes, with similar events lumped together in one short period of time, then nothing like it again for decades. Kind of like horse racing's Triple Crown.

The Day Spiro Agnew Resigned

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In the fall of 1973, my family was living in Nashville while my father was on a four–month sabbatical.

We spent the previous summer in Austria. While we were there, we tried to keep up with what was happening in the Watergate hearings through the international editions of TIME and Newsweek, but the reports were not as complete as Americans were getting here at home — and, of course, there was no way for us to monitor the Watergate hearings that were taking place that summer.

I knew that President Nixon was under mounting public pressure over his involvement in activities related to the Watergate break–in, but I had no idea where it would go. And there must have been news reports about Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, and the problems he was having with those who were investigating his activities as governor of Maryland — even if most of the activity was conducted in secrecy.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote in "The Final Days" that "[b]y August, the details of the Agnew investigation were all over the newspapers," and the following month "plea–bargaining with the vice president's attorneys" had begun.

With everything else that was going on in my life at that time, I suppose I was oblivious to what was happening with Agnew.

Maybe most Americans were, too. Maybe the plea negotiations were conducted in relative secrecy as well. Anyway, I have no memory of anything being said about Agnew's legal problems. (Of course, I was quite young at the time.)

It came as a surprise to me when, 40 years ago today, on an unseasonably warm October afternoon, I walked into the apartment in which my family was living after school had dismissed for the day and found my mother watching news reports on TV. Mind you, this was in the years before cable's explosive popularity, before cable news networks came along. A news report in the middle of an ordinary Wednesday afternoon could only mean that something serious had happened.

And it had. Agnew had resigned.

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He wasn't the first vice president to resign. And, clearly, it wasn't as spontaneous as I naively thought it was at the time.

Agnew submitted his letter of resignation to Nixon, officially saying only that "I hereby resign the Office of Vice President of the United States, effective immediately."

In a more personal letter to the president that was submitted at the same time, Agnew observed that "the accusations against me cannot be resolved without a long, divisive and debilitating struggle in the Congress and in the courts." He had concluded, he wrote, that it was in America's "best interests" for him to resign.

He never addressed the question of whether he was guilty, either in his communication with Nixon or in his actual court appearance, in which he pled nolo contendre — no contest.

In his reply, Nixon didn't address that side of it, either.

Nixon, who also would resign about 10 months later, said he knew Agnew's decision to resign "has been as difficult as any facing a man in public life could be," and it left Nixon "with a great sense of personal loss," but he said he respected the decision.

Nixon commended Agnew for his "courage and candor ... strong patriotism and ... profound dedication to the welfare of the nation," and he thanked him for his service as vice president.

And then, under the provisions of the 25th Amendment — and with everything else that was vying for his attention — Nixon had to choose Agnew's replacement. This was something no other president had ever had to do, and no one knew how long it might take.

Turned out it didn't take too long.

The Centennial of a 'Humble Healer'

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"I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln's. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and his plain speaking."

Gerald Ford

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Today would have been Gerald Ford's 100th birthday. He didn't miss being here for it by much, either. He was 93 when he died in December of 2006.

He lived longer than any other president. So far.

As nearly as I can tell, not much of a fuss is being made about the centennial — except maybe in Ford's hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., where the Grand Rapids Symphony planned a Ford tribute in its Independence Day "Picnic Pops" performance — with the focus being on a special composition written in Ford's honor titled "One of Us, Portrait of A Humble Healer."

This weekend, there have been all sorts of activities in Grand Rapids, and the Vail Daily News in Vail, Colo., where Ford took his ski vacations, says "[t]he valley will stop for a few moments" in Ford's honor.

Other than that, though, there doesn't seem to be much of a fuss, as I said earlier.

In Omaha, Neb., the town where Ford was born, the Omaha World–Herald reports that, while the occasion "will be marked with no pomp and circumstance ... America's 38th president won't be forgotten."

A recent Pew Research Center article observed that, in a Gallup poll last year, a majority of respondents said Ford was an average president, neither above nor below average.

Those who remember the Ford presidency are bound to have differing opinions of him — and that is true of all presidents, even those who have been judged by history to be among the greats. Most folks probably would say Ford was humble. Fewer probably would call him a healer, but I think nearly everyone would agree that Ford was a decent guy.

He was what people of my parents' generation called a "stand–up" guy.

Rarely is there that kind of agreement on any president. But, when compared to the dark, dour and paranoid presidency of Ford's predecessor, Richard Nixon, I guess just about anyone would look like a decent guy.

Ford really was. But he is primarily judged for what was perceived at the time to be a decidedly indecent act — his pardon of Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974, about a month after he took office. Regardless of the general decency of the man, he continues to be judged by many on the basis of that single act.

And that was/is understandable. Nixon's popularity had dropped into the 20s by the time of his resignation. Most of Nixon's fellow Republicans in Congress — on whom Nixon had been counting to keep him from being convicted in an impeachment trial in the Senate — turned on him when the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over the tapes he had been refusing to surrender for months, and the "smoking gun" that proved his early involvement in the Watergate coverup was revealed.

There was a lot of bitterness in the country over the fact that Nixon had dragged the nation through a two–year investigation, protesting his innocence all the while, only to be indisputably shown to be a liar, and, even though there were those who believed an ex–president should not be sent to prison, many more Americans wanted Nixon to stand trial in a court, where he would have to tell the truth or face additional criminal charges.

When Ford pardoned Nixon, it removed any possibility that Nixon would have to face the legal music. That made many Americans angry — enough, some political analysts would say, that it cost Ford election to the presidency in his own right two years later.

Until the end of his life, Ford would say — and not without some justification — that pardoning Nixon was the only way for the country to put Watergate behind it and focus on the sputtering economy.

It was the kind of remark a decent, stand–up kind of guy would make — as were Ford's remarks in his first State of the Union speech in January 1975.

"I must say to you," Ford said, "that the state of the Union is not good: Millions of Americans are out of work. Recession and inflation are eroding the money of millions more. Prices are too high, and sales are too slow. This year’s federal deficit will be about $30 billion; next year's probably $45 billion. The national debt will rise to over $500 billion. Our plant capacity and productivity are not increasing fast enough. We depend on others for essential energy. Some people question their government's ability to make hard decisions and stick with them; they expect Washington politics as usual."

Tell the truth. Can you imagine any other president in your lifetime being quite that blunt with the American people?

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I have often reflected on Ford's decision in late 1973 to accept Nixon's nomination of him to fill the vice presidential vacancy left by the resignation of Spiro Agnew. I have wondered what it was like. In hindsight, it seems somewhat inevitable that Ford would become first vice president and then president. But there must have been a time — however brief it may have been — when Ford's decision had not been made, and it still was possible that he might turn Nixon down.

I always wonder to whom Nixon might then have offered the vice presidency — and how that might have changed America and the world.

Some 16 months earlier, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern had to do something similar when his running mate was dropped and a new one had to be selected. He offered the spot to just about every prominent Democrat, and they all turned him down — until he got to Sargent Shriver.

McGovern never made his offer in public so there are no recordings of those Democrats turning him down — but they always wound up in the news. The details were only made public — if at all — in books or interviews long after the fact.

I have no memory of anyone other than Ford being offered the vice presidency in 1973, but I can imagine a few of the thoughts that must have gone through his mind when the offer was made. And, based on what I know of Ford, I'm sure he consulted his wife, Betty, before giving Nixon an answer.

He always claimed he expected to be something of a place filler for the rest of Nixon's term, and then he would retire to Michigan when it was over. He apparently accepted the vice presidency with no expectation that he would be president. He figured Nixon would ride out the storm.

Well, that was his story. And maybe that really was what he believed. But my memory is that Nixon's approval ratings took a serious hit when it was revealed in the Watergate hearings (coincidentally, a couple of days after Ford's 60th birthday) that there had been a secret taping system in the White House.

That meant that there was a witness that could verify what Nixon and his associates had said in their meetings after the Watergate break–in. The only real question at the time was whether the witness' account would be heard. Would Nixon be able to run out the clock on his term before that account was heard?

Although Nixon and his lawyers tried every legal trick in the book, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in the summer of 1974 — several months after Ford's confirmation as vice president and more than two years before Nixon's term was due to end — that Nixon had to relinquish the tapes to the investigators.

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In those tapes was the "smoking gun" that ended Nixon's presidency.

At that point, most people seemed to realize that it was just a matter of time — and not much of that — before Nixon would be leaving office. By then, Ford must have been anticipating the massive changes that were about to take place in his life.

Ford certainly didn't give the country politics as usual, even though one of his earliest acts was dismissed as such by many Americans. He was like a breath of fresh air when he became president, which is no doubt why so many Americans felt betrayed when he pardoned Nixon.

To continue with the breath of fresh air analogy, it was like breathing fresh oxygen for four weeks after a steady diet carbon dioxide — only to suddenly inhale carbon dioxide again without warning. There was a national coughing spasm.

There was a lot of raw emotion in the Watergate era, and I have often wondered if Ford might not have encountered such a hostile reaction had he waited longer to issue the pardon.

Some economists of the time felt it was urgent to put Nixon and Watergate behind the country so full attention could be given to the economy. But if their counsel prompted Ford to issue the pardon when he did, those economists did both the nation and the new president a disservice.

Although I disagreed, I always felt Ford truly believed it was essential for the country to move forward, and pardoning Nixon was the only way to do that — while he never managed to completely regain the trust he lost when he pardoned Nixon, Ford was an upfront kind of guy, determined to press on no matter how great the adversity.

And the adversity for Ford in the 1976 presidential campaign only got worse when John Dean, the man who first exposed the Watergate coverup, wrote in his book about the scandal that he had heard from another source that Ford had been involved in efforts to postpone a congressional investigation into Watergate until after the 1972 election, which would have made him an accessory.

I came from a family of Nixon haters, but I was willing to give Ford the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was sincere when he said his motivation was to move the country forward. Perhaps it was that quality that made him an All–America center/linebacker and the acknowledged team leader at Michigan in the 1930s. (It was said Ford "would stay and fight in a losing cause.")

Perhaps that trait was honed even earlier, in his days as a Boy Scout.

Whatever the origin may have been, it forced even Ford's political adversaries to admit to a certain amount of admiration for the way he carried himself before, after and during his presidency.

The Triumph of Hope Over Experience

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That is said to be writer Samuel Johnson's assessment of a man who married for a second time after the death of his first wife ... to whom he had been unhappily married for many years.

I have come to the conclusion that it has many potential applications to Barack Obama and his campaign for a second term — but I'm having some difficulty narrowing it down to the best one.

You see, I have long felt that it is an accurate appraisal of any voter's decision to vote for Obama.

Based on his record in office, it's hard for me to see how anyone who did not vote for Obama in 2008 would be inclined to vote for him now.

2008 was when his appeal was at its zenith, when his soaring rhetoric reminded many people of American presidents from the past who are still admired today.

And, perhaps more than any other presidential election in my memory, 2008 was a choice between a candidate in whom voters saw themselves as they wished to be — and a candidate in whom voters saw themselves as they really are.

The voters selected the idealized version — and many have been disappointed. Clearly. Only 45% of Americans approved of the job he is doing in a recent poll on the subject. That's quite a tumble from the 70s and upper 60s of the early days of his presidency.

But 2012 is a different election. Ultimately, Obama will be judged on whether he has delivered on his promises — as is every incumbent president.

Thirty–two years ago, Ronald Reagan summed it up for fence straddlers who were trying to decide whether to give President Jimmy Carter a second term: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Reagan asked, and a majority of voters decided the answer was no.

Reagan the challenger was elected.

This is the eighth election since Reagan asked that question in his debate with Carter (ninth if you count the election in which Reagan defeated Carter). It is the fifth election in which that question has been relevant to one of the candidates (again, if you include 1980, it is the sixth such election).

When the answer has been yes, as it was in 1984 when Reagan sought a second term and in 1996 when Bill Clinton sought a second term, the incumbent has won a resounding victory.

When the answer has been no, though, incumbents generally lose (i.e., Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992) — although they have been known to pull out narrow victories once in awhile (i.e., George W. Bush in 2004).

I have no doubt that many of those who voted for Obama four years ago expected more from him than has been delivered.

Some probably feel obliged to support him now because they share the same party affiliation. For others, he pushes the right buttons when he speaks, whether his actions in office have matched his rhetoric or not.

Still others, I have concluded, feel compelled to support Obama — even if they are not satisfied with his performance in office — because they have decided that it would look bad to the rest of the world if the first black president is rejected by the voters.

Those people, I have noticed, are the first (but hardly the last) to point fingers at Obama's critics and label them racist — whether the label is deserved or not.

Now, I know that there are some people who will vote against Obama because of his race (which, as Morgan Freeman rightly pointed out recently, is not black but, rather, biracial). But far more of those who dissent from Obama do so from deeply held personal convictions.

I learned a long time ago that voters evaluate political candidates on the basis of what matters to them. Politicians (and their most devout supporters) do not get to choose what voters use to make their evaluations.

For some voters, what matters is a candidate's race (or gender or religion or sexual preference). I pity them because they are blind to the experiences and talents that many people bring to the table.

But we have been conditioned to assume that racism only works one way.

Lately, I have been wondering something: If we acknowledge that a certain portion of the vote that will be recorded against Obama in November will be due to his race, shouldn't we also acknowledge that a certain portion of the vote for him will be because of his race?

I know there are people out there who support Obama solely because he is black. I know some of them personally, and I know others from their arguments.

Arguments like ...

"Well, I know he isn't perfect, and I disagreed with him when he did W and X, and I didn't approve when he said Y and Z. And I don't feel comfortable with his positions on A, B and C.

"And he could have done more than he's done, but I'm going to vote for him, anyway."

These are the enablers.

And then there are excusers:

"None of this is his fault. He inherited a terrible mess that was years in the making, and it's going to take years to clean it up."

Perhaps, but recent polls I've seen say that about three–quarters of the voters believe the economy and jobs are the most important issues facing this nation.

That really isn't new. A majority of Americans believed that the economy and jobs were the most important issues facing us in 2008.

Or they will say, "We're screwed either way," and then they will tell you that they will vote to keep the guy who is in office.

I've asked some people if they would be inclined to re–elect a white president under these circumstances. They all said no, but they all said they would vote for Obama.

Four years ago, I told anyone who would listen (and even some who didn't want to) that whoever was elected, Obama or John McCain, his urgent mission would be to put America back to work.

If he did not, I warned, he would pay a severe price when he sought re–election.

Well, here we are, four years later. Obama has done little, if anything, to promote job creation. His policies have, in fact, restricted job creation.

And he continues to blame his predecessor — who certainly deserves his share of the blame for what he did in office but not for decisions that have been made since he left the White House.

This is pass–the–buck politics. It used to stop at the president's desk but no more.

This is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Ronald Reagan didn't continue to flog Carter after he had been in office for 3½ years. Nor did Clinton continue to flog the first George Bush when he had been in office for 3½ years.

But Obama feels entitled to play by different rules, and some of his supporters — in what must be the ultimate example of the triumph of hope over experience — are willing to permit him to do so in spite of mounting evidence that points to the folly of such an approach.

I guess those people never watched a carnival shell game — because that's how it works. The guy who is playing the game keeps talking and keeps distracting, and the mark loses track of where he thinks the pea is.

We are about to embark on a week of shrill, unfounded name calling and mudslinging at the Democrats' convention in Charlotte, N.C., on behalf of a man who hasn't been able to bring unemployment below 8% in the entirety of his term.

That must be evidence of reverse racism.

Certainly, it is proof that Samuel Johnson was right.

Joe Biden Is Not the Problem

I first heard the rumblings nearly two years ago.

In August of 2010, I wrote about former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder's suggestion that Barack Obama should replace Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton in 2012, but my tendency then was to dismiss it as idle talk by people who really didn't know what they were talking about.

The topic reappeared last fall, and, when I heard it said that good ol' Joe Biden had to go, that he was a drag on Obama, I responded by writing that "too much emphasis is placed on the vice presidential nomination."

I wrote that "I don't think replacing Biden with anyone, Hillary or anyone else, is the answer for what ails Obama."

And I still believe that, even though I read articles at least once a week now suggesting that Obama needs to drop Biden.

It seems to me that, whenever incumbent presidents have been preparing to run for a second term, this kind of talk always seems to surface.

Sometimes it makes sense. In 1992, for example, there was a lot of talk about how George H.W. Bush needed to replace Dan Quayle on his ticket. Quayle had gained a reputation, whether fairly or unfairly, for always saying something stupid, and some people felt he was a drag on the ticket.

Now, in 1992, I was never going to vote for Bush, anyway, but I could sympathize with the sentiment. Quayle was ridiculed so much in those days that it really didn't take much persuading to convince anyone that Bush was bound to do better with someone else on his ticket.

Bush wound up keeping Quayle on the ticket, though, and, in hindsight, it is hard to imagine anyone who could have helped Bush win more than 100 electoral votes from Clinton. I think the challenger was going to win that election.

Some years are like that. I have to say that 1980 was like that. President Jimmy Carter was on shaky ground in all aspects of his presidency, and the talk that surfaced during his battle with Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination about dropping Vice President Walter Mondale probably had a lot to do with strategy and little, if anything, to do with Mondale's actual performance in office.

Mondale remained on the ticket, and I can't see how any other Democrat could have helped Carter avoid his landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan.

Usually such talk is frivolous. I don't know where it comes from. Perhaps it is a trial balloon to see if there is any way the incumbent can ratchet up his vote total with a fresh face.

If that is what it is, the conclusion usually is that changing the running mate won't make that much difference. Voters judge incumbent presidents on their records, and the voters' sense of fairness (to which Obama ceaselessly, relentlessly, seeks to appeal) tells them that, unless a vice president is guilty of some egregious offense — that if he has been doing his job (which, constitutionally, only requires him to preside over the Senate and break ties when they occur) — he does not deserve to be dropped.

So Reagan kept George H.W. Bush in 1984. Clinton kept Al Gore in 1996. George W. Bush kept Dick Cheney in 2004. Each was, at some point in those re–election campaigns, the focus of a drop ______ movement.

If Obama does drop Biden, my sense is that the voters, many of whom have become super sensitive to workplace fairness in recent years, would demand to know the reason — and, of course, there are few things that the administration could plausibly blow out of proportion to justify such a move.

The truth is that there is precious little that Obama can point to that will validate his claim that he needs and deserves a second term.

He can't run on his economic record. Unemployment was 6.5% nationally when Obama was elected in November 2008. It has been well above that level throughout his presidency.

His signature achievement, Obamacare, is likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court in the next few weeks.

Instead of bringing people together, Obama has polarized this nation to a greater extent than it was before he was elected.

None of those things can be blamed on Biden. Democrats knew when he was chosen to be Obama's running mate in 2008 that he was gaffe prone — but, for the most part, he's been a good soldier, doing the heavy lifting when he was asked to do it and generally keeping his tongue in check.

Gallup reports that Americans are divided on Biden. The latest survey is, as Jeffrey Jones observes, "the first time opinions of Biden have tilted negative since he became Obama's vice presidential pick," but the numbers are "not materially different" from the public's assessment of him from 2009 to 2011.

And this survey was conducted after both Biden's comments about same–sex marriage on Meet the Press and Obama's comments in an interview a few days later in which he said he supported the legalization of such marriages.

In the week that has passed, Biden has been criticized for forcing the president's hand. But I think it was done deliberately. Obama knows that the polls have shown a general softening in public opposition to gay marriage, and I believe this was an excuse for Obama to give lip service to an issue that he believes will energize groups who helped him win last time.

And, with the last president's experience fresh in his mind, Obama is doing the same thing — he's using gay marriage to distract attention from the real issues.

I knew several women who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries. When John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate, it was mostly a ploy to attract Hillary's supporters, many of whom were thought to be up for grabs in the early fall of 2008.

That ploy failed for several reasons. Polls were showing a pretty close race between Obama and McCain until the economic collapse in September 2008. That, combined with Bush fatigue, pretty much assured that Obama would win.

Ironically, though, Obama had chosen his running mate in large part to bolster his ticket's foreign policy credentials. Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time he was chosen to run with Obama, and there had been some international tensions that summer.

But foreign policy is way down the list in 2012. And, even if it wasn't, Obama has been trumpeting his role in the killing of Osama bin Laden last year. He doesn't need Biden's help in that category anymore.

Of course, Hillary has been secretary of state under this president so her greatest selling point — other than her gender — is her expertise in foreign policy.

And foreign policy is not on most voters' minds this year.

All that Obama has left is class warfare, which is hardly the inclusive, hope and change banner under which he campaigned four years ago. It is the divide and conquer politics that people have been complaining about for years.

Changing running mates won't alter the fundamentals of this campaign. The voters will do what they always do when an incumbent is on the ballot — they will assess the incumbent's record and decide if they want four more years of it.

'Democrat Wars'

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Lately, a proposal that is usually made as a way to offer a glimmer of hope to an embattled president seeking re–election — dropping the vice president from the ticket — has resurfaced.

In the case of Barack Obama, the idea has been bandied about for more than a year now. The latest to bring it up is Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun–Times, who writes that "[t]he idea still has juice" and that Joe Biden's logical replacement would be Hillary Clinton, providing instant appeal to certain groups with whom Obama had problems in 2008.

Washington acknowledges, though, that, while the president "has been having a very bad year," her most reliable source in these matters, a political science professor with expertise in the American presidency, says changing running mates would be "admitting failure." It would smack of desperation, the professor says, and "I just don't think they're at a point of desperation."

I don't know if this White House has reached such a point of desperation yet — and I have my doubts about the mindset that suggests that dropping a vice president from the ticket is going to make up for any perceived shortcomings in the president — but I find the timing of all this to be ironic.

It is just about taken for granted these days that a presidential general election campaign is going to include televised debates.

The series of Kennedy–Nixon debates of 1960 has achieved a somewhat mythical status in American history. They were the first — and, for several years, the only — such debates. They blazed a trail that almost disappeared in the accumulated undergrowth of time and inattention.

The major–party nominees did not debate each other in the next three presidential election years, but, in 1976, they agreed to a series of debates.

And, in every succeeding presidential election year, at least one debate has been held.

As I say, presidential debates were not new in 1976, but they were exceedingly rare. A debate between the vice presidential nominees, however, was new, and the first one was held 35 years ago tonight in Houston.

Now, historically, the job description for the vice president is kind of sparse. Most folks think of the vice president as sort of a president–in–waiting, the first in line if the incumbent president is unable to serve.

But that particular role was not spelled out in the Constitution until the passage of the 25th Amendment — and every vice president who became president following the death of the incumbent between 1841 and 1963 (that is eight in all) did so based on an assumption that was made when William Henry Harrison died in 1841, not on any sort of constitutional provision.

Traditionally, the vice president serves as the president of the Senate, which means very little. It is the vice president's job to maintain order — and he may vote, but only in the event of a tie. The vice president has also served as the United States' representative at the weddings and funerals of foreign dignitaries.

For the most part, though, vice presidents have been, in the words of Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president, John Garner, the executive branch's "spare tire."

(Ironically, the 1976 Republican presidential nominee, Gerald Ford, was the first — and, so far, only — vice president who became president following the adoption of the 25th Amendment.)

That made it difficult to ask questions that were relevant to the constitutional definition of the job. Maybe that is why vice presidential nominees never debated before Oct. 15, 1976. I mean, no one would tune in to watch vice presidential nominees arguing about which one was more experienced at sitting through long meetings or handling jet lag.

So the emphasis was on the role of president–in–waiting, practically assuming that one, if not both, would become president eventually (and, in fact, both were nominated for the presidency in future elections, but neither was elected), and the nominees debated topics that were more appropriate for presidential nominees. They did not discuss the kinds of situations they were most likely to face as vice president.

That alone turned the debate into an exercise in the hypothetical — and then Republican nominee Bob Dole, who hoped to bail out President Ford following his unfortunate gaffe in his debate with Jimmy Carter a week before, compared the number of American casualties in "Democrat wars" in the 20th century to the population of Detroit.

Democrat Walter Mondale protested that the wars had bipartisan support, and post–debate surveys indicated that a majority of viewers felt Dole's comments were unduly harsh.

"Does he really mean that there was a partisan difference over our involvement in the fight against Nazi Germany?" Mondale asked incredulously, echoing the response of many viewers.

In his book about the 1976 campaign, "Marathon," Jules Witcover wrote:

"[A]s I sat at my typewriter at the Washington Post, watching the debate on television and writing the article about it against a late deadline, I thought of Richard Nixon," Witcover wrote. "It was reminiscent of Nixon's seesaw performance at his famous 'last press conference' of 1962 ... There was a nervous, erratic quality about Dole, a carelessness. He spun off snide remarks almost as if he were unaware of the huge television audience or, perhaps more accurately, as if he were intentionally disdainful of it."

I always felt Witcover was on target in his assessment of Dole, and the characterization of his comments during the debate as "snide" describes them perfectly.

As he got older, Dole's personality seemed to mellow, but, in 1976, his brashness simply rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

I never felt that he was much of a plus for the Republican ticket to begin with — and he certainly wasn't on this night 35 years ago.

In hindsight, Ford might have been better served by retaining the vice president he appointed when he succeeded Nixon — Nelson Rockefeller. But conservative Republicans, who were in the process of seizing control of the party, would not have stood for that — even if it could have been satisfactorily demonstrated to them that Rockefeller's more amiable personality went over better with mainstream voters.

I often think too much emphasis is placed on the vice presidential nomination — as if observers expect the running mate to become president automatically, but we've had seven vice presidents since Ford became president and only one has gone on to become president — and he did so mostly because he had the good fortune to run in the wake of a popular president who was prohibited by law from seeking a third term.

There is also too much emphasis on — and too little historical evidence to demonstrate — the running mate's potential to attract voters who have not been enthusiastic about the presidential nominee. In 1976, Dole was expected to help win over conservatives who opposed Ford in the primaries, thus uniting the party for victory in November.

But that didn't happen.

And I don't think replacing Biden with anyone, Hillary or anyone else, is the answer for what ails Obama.

Like the criticism that historians often have of generals, that they are guilty of fighting the last war, not the latest one. The groups that preferred Hillary over Obama in 2008 wanted her to be president, not vice president, and I've seen no evidence that those groups would be more favorably inclined to support Obama now than they were then.

When I was growing up, the conventional wisdom about running mates was that, at best, they should do no harm to the ticket. They were even expected to help the ticket, to a certain extent, but not to win the election for the ticket.

That was — and, as far as I can tell, still is — the presidential nominee's responsibility.

Advising Obama

I don't hear the name Doug Wilder mentioned very often these days.

There was a time, though, when one heard his name quite frequently — the late 1980s, when he was narrowly elected the first black governor of Virginia, and the early 1990s, when he was (briefly) a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

After his term as governor ended (and he was prevented, by state law, from seeking re–election), he sort of dropped out of sight. He emerged to run for mayor of Richmond — and was elected — in 2004, then decided not to seek a second term.

Other than that, he seems to have been content serving as an adjunct professor in public policy at Virginia Commonwealth University, but he has been known to write editorials for various papers in Virginia, where he is still highly regarded as a knowledgeable and influential figure.

Today, though, he seems to be trying to expand his influence beyond Virginia's state lines in his quest to aid the first black to be elected president.

The midterm elections, in which Democrats are now widely expected to take anywhere from a modest beating to a severe thrashing, have not been held, but Wilder writes, in Politico, that "[i]t would be good for President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party to address some important issues" well in advance of 2012.

He points out that Obama's approval ratings have been poor (perhaps not as poor as George W. Bush's were at the end of his presidency, but, when compared to the approval ratings he enjoyed in the early days of his presidency, his current numbers certainly seem puny) and observes, like a parent scolding a child over a bad grade in school, that he must improve.

It won't be easy, he cautions, and there is no "simple fix," but there is one thing Obama can do.

Now, when I think of "important issues" — the most important issues facing America in 2010 — I think of matters of substance, things that can affect the quality of people's lives — like the jobless rate or housing foreclosures or unpopular wars (Obama asserted yesterday, by the way, that American military involvement in Iraq, something he says he has opposed all along, is on schedule to conclude at the end of this month).

Actually being seen doing something every day to deal with one — or preferably all — of these issues might help his fellow Democrats who are on the ballot this year. It worked for FDR in 1934. Roosevelt's policies had not ended the Great Depression. But he was visibly trying to do something about unemployment every day, and the voters knew it.

And they rewarded his party for it in the midterm elections.

Time is short. There isn't much that can be achieved in 13 weeks. And, to be sure, this vague talk about unverifiable jobs that have been saved by Obama's policies is a tough sell for voters. The Bible may praise those who have believed without seeing, but, for most folks, seeing is believing.

Perhaps we'll see evidence this week that jobs are being created. It seems more likely that we will not. But Obama will still be in office after the midterms are over. The as yet unanswered question is how many Democrats will there be in Congress? If Obama has learned anything as president, it should be that his party's control of Congress is the key to the success of his administration.

The more Democratic seats that are saved, the easier it will be for Obama to make tangible improvements in the second half of his term. And that will be at the heart of his case for a second term.

That's how his presidency will be judged. Whichever party controls the chambers of Congress come January, it seems likely to me that, in 2012, Republicans will ask voters the same question Ronald Reagan asked them in 1980: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

Public opinion, of course, is fluid, and what poll respondents say today may differ from what they will say tomorrow. But, whether it's by a narrow margin or a wider one, today's polls consistently suggest the answer is not likely to be the one Obama wants.

Focusing in a very public way on the things that people are really worried about is a long shot now. It's what he should have been doing all along. His failure to do so has caused a lot of suffering that many voters will find it hard to forget.

But I guess that's all water under the bridge now, isn't it?

Well, anyway, that would be my advice to Obama — if he's really interested in improving his standing with the voters before 2012. The people are scared. Do something — or at least look like you're trying to do something — about what scares them.

But Wilder's got something else in mind.

Obama, he says, needs to "reconnect with the 2008 campaign themes he used to barnstorm the nation: 'audacity' and 'change.' "

And Wilder says the way to do that is to change running mates.

Now, dumping a vice president is not a new idea. I recall plenty of talk in 1992 about how George H.W. Bush should jettison Dan Quayle — which, ultimately, he did not do. I guess he recalled how he felt when, eight years earlier, there were some Republicans who said Ronald Reagan should pitch Bush overboard.

It was kind of a weird case of recent history repeating itself — sort of. In the early 1970s, some prominent Republicans urged Richard Nixon to discard his vice president, Spiro Agnew. He didn't, but, in hindsight, he may have wished he had. Agnew resigned the year after his re–election, awash in a sea of corruption charges. A generation earlier, many Republicans said Dwight Eisenhower should drop Nixon from his ticket — until Nixon swung public opinion in his favor with his famed "Checkers" speech.

Don't get me wrong. Democratic presidencies haven't been immune. There just haven't been as many of them. I remember hearing some talk and reading some columns in 1980 that advocated dropping Walter Mondale from the Democratic ticket. He wasn't inspiring enough, it was said. Turned out, Carter wasn't inspiring enough to be re–elected. It's doubtful the outcome would have been altered if Mondale had been dropped from the ticket.

Actually, while there may have been talk — sometimes fanciful, sometimes serious — about dropping just about every vice president (especially those who served under unpopular presidents), it has rarely happened.

• FDR was elected president four times with three different running mates. His first vice president, John Garner, had been his political rival until it became clear FDR would win the nomination. At that point, Garner made a deal with the likely nominee that earned him the No. 2 spot. His relationship with Roosevelt appears to have been good; he was renominated for a second term, but after the two were re–elected, things turned sour.
  
  Acting on the assumption that FDR would limit himself to two terms (at a time in American history when presidential term limits hadn't yet been voted into law), Garner jumped into the race. Then FDR let it be known that he would seek a third term. Garner, who was more conservative than most New Dealers would have preferred, probably could have remained on the ticket if he had chosen to withdraw from the race, but he didn't.
  
  So FDR chose his decidedly progressive agriculture secretary, Henry Wallace, to be his new running mate. And Wallace was elected in 1940. But he was dropped in 1944, when FDR was nominated for a fourth term. Wallace was thought to be too pro–Soviet by those who were prominent in the party — most of whom suspected that Roosevelt's health was worse than he or his doctors would admit and feared (rightfully, as it turned out) that he wouldn't live through a fourth term.
  
  If that came to pass, they didn't want Wallace next in line to be president.
  
  Thus, Harry Truman was chosen to be FDR's third and final running mate — and, as it turned out, his successor. And Wallace, who wound up running for president as the nominee of the Progressive Party in 1948, missed becoming president by less than 90 days in 1945.
• In 1892, Republican President Benjamin Harrison was nominated for a second term, but his vice president, Levi Morton, was not. As the president of the Senate, he appears to have been ineffective at promoting Harrison's agenda, so Harrison selected someone else to be his running mate.
• Interestingly, the president with whom Obama has most closely identified, Abraham Lincoln, dropped his original vice president as well.
  
  Lincoln was elected as a Republican, but, when he sought a second term in 1864, he ran as the nominee of the National Union Party, which was really a coalition of Republicans who were loyal to Lincoln and some Northern Democrats — as well as some Southern Democrats.
  
  Lincoln's thoughts were on Reconstruction, and the decision to drop Vice President Hannibal Hamlin from the ticket appears to have been made primarily with that in mind.

Back in September of 2008, there were still those in the Democratic Party who thought Obama's former rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton, should have been his running mate — and among those who wondered publicly if Clinton would have been a better choice was the man who got the nomination (and the job), then–Sen. Joe Biden. Before the economic meltdown, which appears to have permanently altered the dynamics of the race, there was considerable speculation about what those who had supported Clinton in the primaries would do in November. Well, Wilder seems to feel that Biden has come up short of expectations as vice president, and he advocates replacing Biden with Clinton in 2012. "That would be both needed change and audacious," Wilder writes, adding that Clinton has been a "team player" since the president–elect tapped her to be secretary of state. Actually, a lot of people spoke very highly of Clinton's speech to the 2008 Democratic convention, in which (it was said) she demonstrated that same "team player" mentality. I didn't get the same feeling, but I must admit that she appears to have been loyal to this administration. And Wilder believes Clinton could be helpful in retaining the support of middle–class independents and working–class voters, who were staunch supporters of Clinton in the 2008 primaries. "Without their support" in 2012, Wilder asserts, "Obama cannot win." I can't argue with the case that he makes that Biden was chosen because Obama had long campaigned against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he wanted to shore up his credentials on foreign policy when he selected his running mate in August of 2008. In that regard, Biden brought much more to the table than Clinton did. But the political dialogue is considerably different now. People are still interested in seeing the wars ended — and the money that is being spent on them redirected to domestic concerns — but millions of Americans have lost their jobs and/or their homes since Biden was chosen. For whatever reason, Clinton is perceived as being more sympathetic to their plight. Meanwhile, Biden has been having a string of "YouTube moments." "Biden has not distinguished himself, other than to be more prone to gaffes," says Wilder, "which had been cited by some skeptics when Obama first announced his choice." I admit, he makes a good point when he complains of the impression Biden left after an appearance on behalf of the Democrats' gubernatorial candidate in Florida. And criticism of Biden's assertion that "the heavy lifting is over" is well taken.

But, ultimately, I will say what I have said all along about running mates.

People do not vote for the running mate. They vote for the candidate at the top of the ticket.

And the Democrats' likely standard bearer in 2012 has a lot of work to do — work that he should have been doing all along.

It is not work that either Biden or Clinton can do for him.

If his re–election depends on his running mate, that says a lot more about his presidency than any one individual can say.

Going Rogue

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rogue (noun)

1. vagrant, tramp


2. a dishonest or worthless person : scoundrel


3. a mischievous person : scamp

Merriam–Webster Online Dictionary

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The other night, a high school classmate of mine made an interesting observation on Facebook.

Referring to Sarah Palin's new book, "Going Rogue," my ex–classmate posted the Merriam–Webster link and wondered, "So, which of these definitions does Sarah Palin think best describes herself?"

He confessed that "ever since the book was announced I've been very puzzled by her choice of titles."

Another former classmate tried to clarify the point, saying, "She is using the term that McCain's staffers used about her."

The first classmate responded, "So she wants to emphasize the fact that the people whose job it was to sell her to the public thought she was unstable and irresponsible? If I were managing her 'brand' I would counsel her to reconsider. Maybe this is all part of being a 'maverick' ..."

I wasn't a Palin fan last year — in the interest of full disclosure, I wasn't an Obama fan, either — and she never seems to make it easy on people like me. This is the 24th post I have written in which "Palin" has been listed as a label, and I have tried — or, at least, I feel that I have tried — to give her the benefit of the doubt.

When it comes to Palin, I rarely agree with her on anything, but I do try to be fair. Her book hasn't hit the store shelves yet so I haven't read her side of the story, but I am unaware of any lobbying that she did (or that anyone did on her behalf) to encourage John McCain to pick her as his running mate.

In fact, Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson wrote, in "The Battle for America 2008," that, although McCain had been reviewing possible running mates since securing the nomination in the spring, Palin's name wasn't added to the list of prospects until about a month before the Republican convention — when the McCain campaign "became alarmed at the size of Obama's lead among women."

If it turns out that Palin waged an active campaign to be chosen, I would feel differently. But the Balz–Johnson account tends to confirm what I have suspected all along — that she was not chosen because of her political views but because of her gender.

McCain, I have contended, believed that the majority of Hillary Clinton's supporters could be persuaded to support his campaign if he had a female running mate. But, while Clinton's supporters undoubtedly were disappointed that she came up short in her bid for the Democratic nomination, it turned out they were driven more by ideology than gender.

McCain might have been more successful in winning their support if he had chosen a centrist woman to be his running mate — but I have seen no indication that ideology played a key role in Palin's selection.

Once she was on the ticket, campaign officials may have experienced "buyer's remorse" when it became clear that she was in over her head — but it should be noted that McCain was the buyer. He may have felt remorseful at times, but I think that was overridden by his desire to avoid appearing indecisive in what was perceived to be his first presidential–level decision.

The role of the campaign staff was to be supportive of the ticket and try to help shore up any weaknesses, like the fact that she came across as inexperienced and uninformed in her interviews with Katie Couric. If she was ill–prepared for the national spotlight during the fall campaign, it was in part because the campaign does not appear to have made much effort to address her deficiencies.

It was legitimate, for example, to question Palin about the leaders of foreign countries and America's relationships with those countries because, if elected vice president, that was the kind of knowledge she would need if she eventually became president. But five vice presidents had been elected since the last time a sitting vice president ascended to the presidency, and such knowledge wasn't strictly part of the definition of the job for which she was a candidate. The vice president presides over the Senate. In modern times, the vice president has been dispatched to represent the United States at the weddings and funerals of foreign dignitaries so familiarity with the governments of foreign countries is a good thing to have, but it is not a constitutional requirement.

The vice president is next in line for the presidency, but it has been nearly 50 years since a vice president became president following the death of a president, and it has been 35 years since a vice president became president following the resignation of a president. As I observed before either running mate was chosen, we're overdue — historically — for such a thing to happen, but, in a lifetime of studying the presidency and presidential campaigns, I have seldom come across an instance in which a prospective vice president was chosen because he (or she) was believed to be the most qualified to take over as president if that became necessary.

I have seen running mates who were chosen because their presence on the ticket, it was believed, would heal political wounds and unify the party (i.e., Ronald Reagan's choice of George H.W. Bush, his main rival for the 1980 Republican nomination, and John Kerry's selection of John Edwards as his 2004 running mate). I have seen running mates who, like Palin, were picked because it was believed they would appeal to certain demographic groups (i.e., Walter Mondale's choice of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984).

I have even seen people who were mentioned frequently as potential running mates primarily as lip service to shaky supporters.

Perhaps my classmate was right. Perhaps McCain's staffers did view Palin as "unstable and irresponsible." If so, they weren't the only ones. But it was their task, as my classmate also observed, to "sell" her to the voters. And they failed.

I'm inclined to believe Palin is right when she says she has been made a scapegoat for McCain's defeat. As objectionable as she may have seemed to many voters, I don't believe any running mate could have salvaged the Republican ticket after the economic meltdown occurred.

Having a running mate who went "rogue" did not cost McCain the election. No matter which definition one takes for that word.

Another Lincoln Bicentennial

August 27 was always an important date in my family. As I have observed elsewhere, today was my mother's birthday.

She was born and raised in Texas, where August 27 actually is a legal state holiday, although it wasn't one when she was a child and it probably comes and goes today without the knowledge of many state employees. You see, August 27 was Lyndon Johnson's birthday. After Johnson's death, the state legislature created a holiday on his birthday. It is optional, and state offices do not close for it. In fact, much of today's workforce probably would not recognize Johnson's name.

Elsewhere, I guess, August 27 isn't a very significant day. But, since we observed the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln earlier this year, it seems to me that someone needs to point out that today is the 200th birthday of Lincoln's first vice president — Hannibal Hamlin.

Hamlin is kind of a nondescript figure in American history. He and Lincoln didn't even meet each other until after they were elected. His is not a household name, but Hamlin was the charter member of a very exclusive club — a politician from the state of Maine who was on a major party national ticket. In fact, I guess you could say he belongs to an even more exclusive club — politicians from Maine who were elected to a national office.

In 1860, he was elected the first vice president from the Republican Party. Apparently, he was a skilled orator and a vocal opponent of slavery, and he would have become president following Lincoln's assassination if he had been renominated in 1864. But that year, Lincoln ran under the banner of the National Union Party, which was a coalition of Republicans loyal to Lincoln and Northern Democrats, plus a few Southern Democrats. The National Union Party chose Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat from Tennessee, to be Lincoln's running mate. Lincoln's attention was on postwar Reconstruction, and he believed a Southerner like Johnson could help him with that.

In hindsight, it might have been better if Hamlin had been allowed to run for re–election with Lincoln. A few years after Lincoln's assassination, Johnson, of course, was impeached by the House and then acquitted by a single vote in the Senate trial.

Presidential candidate Jame Blaine was the next Mainer to be nominated for national office. He lost to Grover Cleveland in a bitterly contested election in 1884. Blaine and many of his supporters believed their defeat was due to a narrow loss in New York, where, shortly before the election, a Protestant minister used the controversial phrase "rum, Romanism and rebellion" to summarize what Democrats stood for — rum being a reference to the liquor interests, Romanism being a reference to Catholics (then, as now, a sizable constituency in New York) and rebellion being a reference to the Confederacy.

That was also the campaign in which it was revealed that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child, leading to the famous Republican chant, "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" Even so, Cleveland became the only Democrat to win the presidency in the late 19th century. When he won the election, jubilant Democrats added the line "Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!"

A man named Arthur Sewall was the next Mainer to be nominated by his party for national office. He was a Democrat who never held office but was a member of the Democratic National Committee in the 1880s and 1890s. William Jennings Bryan picked him as his running mate in 1896. The Bryan—Sewall ticket was beaten by William McKinley, and Sewall's name was largely forgotten for more than a century — until he was mentioned by the St. Louis Post–Dispatch in its endorsement of Barack Obama last year.

The Post–Dispatch told its readers that John McCain was guilty of "selecting the least qualified running mate since the Swedenborgian shipbuilder Arthur Sewall ran as William Jennings Bryan's No. 2 in 1896." That probably sent more than a few history students — and their teachers — scurrying for their history books, wondering Who the heck was Arthur Sewall?

Bonus points are in order if you know (without looking it up) what Swedenborgian means.

The newspaper's endorsement seems to have been ignored by the voters. Missouri voted for McCain.

The most recent Mainer on a national ticket (unless I have overlooked someone) was Edmund Muskie, who was chosen to be Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968. The Humphrey–Muskie ticket lost a close election to Richard Nixon, with independent segregationist George Wallace carrying five states and threatening, at one point, to send the selection of the next president to the House of Representatives.

Anyway, Hamlin is the only politician from Maine who has ever been elected vice president. He died on Independence Day in 1891.

What a Long, Strange Trip It Is

When I was studying journalism in college, one thing my professors constantly told us was that it was essential for journalists to be unbiased, to maintain their balance when writing about the news.

There is a place for opinion, they told us. That is the editorial page.

Maybe they taught me that lesson too well, because there are times when I feel like Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof," mulling the pros and cons of his daughters' choices for husbands. Do you remember those scenes? Tevye would say to himself, "On one hand ..." then he would think of a counter–argument and say, "On the other hand ..." and then he would go back to the original side of the fence, saying, "On the other hand ..."

Like Tevye, I am running out of hands.

There is often ambiguity in news writing because, even though journalists would like to give their readers all the facts the first time, they seldom have the luxury of knowing all the facts. Sometimes it is months, or even years, before all the facts are known. A good example is the recently observed 35th anniversary of President Nixon's resignation. It took more than two years of old–fashioned investigative journalism before the extent of Nixon's involvement in the Watergate coverup became known.

A significant obstacle that confronts journalists didn't really have a convenient name when I started out as a general assignment reporter. But it does now. I refer to the concept of "spin."

Well, actually, I guess it did have a name in those days — "propaganda." I guess that's the sort of thing they studied a lot in public relations classes. In news writing classes, we didn't spend much time on propaganda — except discussing what it was and how to avoid it when we could.

But "spin" seems, somehow, to be a more accessible term for the practice of manipulating the public on issues and politicians.

Sarah Palin, for example, is good at that, as Richard Cohen observes in the New York Daily News. Cohen finds her tactics, now being called "Palinisms," troubling. He compares her rants against health care to Joe McCarthy's rants against Communists.

"For sheer disregard of the facts, her statement about President Obama's 'death panel' has to rank with McCarthy's announcement that 'I have here in my hand a list of 205' (or 57 or 72 or whatever) names of communists in the State Department," Cohen writes. "They were both false — McCarthy's by commission, Palin's probably by omission. She rarely knows her facts."

Well, that isn't too surprising, coming from a woman who claimed to be able to see Russia from her house in Alaska but couldn't say much about world governments when asked direct questions.

Nevertheless, Palin seems to have tapped into something on the health care issue. Those who are fearful of government intervention have rallied behind her, even though her overall approval ratings have fallen. That's good news for Democrats, who seem confident that Barack Obama can prevail over Palin if she is his opponent in 2012, and poll figures appear to support that contention.

But I keep reminding people that this is 2009, and Obama's party still needs to get through the midterm elections next year before gearing up for the president's re–election bid.

Some of my friends accuse me of engaging in anti–Obama propaganda when I say that I think Republicans will make gains in next year's elections. But I'm merely speaking from an historian's perspective. I minored in history when I was in college, and I know that the party that holds the White House almost always struggles in the midterm elections.

In fact, in my lifetime, only two presidents have avoided congressional losses in the midterm elections that were held after they took office. That has been true whether the president was elected by a narrow margin or a wide margin.

Spin it whichever way you will. Facts are facts.

When people protest that Obama was elected by wide margins in the popular and electoral votes, I remind them that Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 by wide margins but his party lost control of Congress two years later; that Ronald Reagan was elected by wide margins in 1980 but his party lost more than two dozen House seats in 1982; that Jimmy Carter won by relatively narrow margins in 1976 and his party lost 15 House seats and three Senate seats in 1978; that Richard Nixon's party lost a dozen House seats two years after he was elected president; that Lyndon Johnson won by a huge landslide less than a year after succeeding John F. Kennedy in 1963, but Democrats lost 48 House seats and three Senate seats in 1966.

These aren't my opinions. They're facts. In the last 17 midterm elections, the president's party has lost an average of 28 House seats and four Senate seats.

Obama supporters also have criticized me for saying that his stratospheric approval numbers could not be sustained. Again, this was historical perspective talking. I've seen many presidents who took office with high approval numbers, but they dropped once the president began governing. The decline is more precipitous for some than it is for others, but some have had farther to fall.

Arthur C. Brooks of the Wall Street Journal tries to explain why Obama's numbers are dropping. He makes some interesting points, but the truth is that it happens to every president. Some people insist on seeing it as racist in nature. I'm not so naive that I don't think there may be elements of racism involved, but I think that is too simplistic an answer. It's a convenient scapegoat for supporters of this president.

But that brings me to something that I read earlier today. My pastor has his own blog, and he wrote today about the "lunatic fringe" and his concerns that some people are getting whipped up into a frenzy that could lead to an assassination attempt.

No matter who the president is, no matter whether I agree with him or not, I have never felt that violence was the answer. Not in a democracy. Not in a nation that is supposed to be free.

But last year, before anyone knew whether Obama or Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee (and I remember saying this even before it was clear that John McCain would be the Republican nominee), I told people — and I wrote in this blog — that the next vice president would be crucial.

Between 1841 and 1974, nine vice presidents became president because the incumbent president died or resigned. That's roughly one every 15 years. It's now been 35 years since the last time that happened so, from an historical standpoint, we're long overdue.

If McCain was elected, I said last year, it was not inconceivable to think a man in his 70s would not live to complete his four–year term. And if Obama or Clinton won, I said, the chances were pretty good that someone would try to assassinate the first black or the first woman president.

Consequently, I said, the selections of running mates had the potential to be extremely important, and I urged people to consider the running mates when they were deciding which presidential candidate to support because the next vice president could easily be president before the next presidential election is held.

Well, we now know the identity of the next vice president — Joe Biden. I hope he doesn't have to assume the burdens of the presidency, but I hope he is prepared to do so if the need comes up.

I don't always agree with Obama, but I don't want to see anyone kill him.

I don't know if my pastor would be shocked if it happened, but it wouldn't surprise me. America is not as post–racial as many people would like to believe.

And the lunatic fringe is just as looney as it has ever been.

That's no spin. Just fact.

The Man Who Might Have Been President

Levi Morton was an interesting fellow. He was vice president of the United States under Benjamin Harrison from 1889 to 1893, but that wasn't what was particularly remarkable about the man.

Permit me to backtrack a little here.

Morton was born in Vermont 185 years ago today. In 1878, when he was 54 years old, he was elected to the House of Representatives from New York, and he was re–elected in 1880.

Earlier in 1880, Morton declined an offer to be the running mate with Republican presidential nominee James Garfield, who ended up choosing another native of Vermont, Chester Arthur, to be his running mate.

Garfield went on to be elected president and appointed Morton to be minister to France, a position he held until 1885. But, if Morton had accepted Garfield's offer to be his running mate — and assuming that all other events would have occurred as they did — Morton would have become the 21st president of the United States because Garfield was assassinated in 1881.

Actually, Morton may have indirectly played a role in Garfield's assassination. Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated Garfield, supposedly did so because he felt he had been "passed over" as minister to France.

Well, that may or may not have been true. Most people believe that Guiteau was delusional, and he may have been the only person who thought he was being considered for that post. But apparently he did believe it — and, also, felt so strongly about the snub that he took matters into his own hands.

My intention here, though, is not to tell Guiteau's story but Morton's. In October of 1881, about a month after Garfield's death, Morton placed the first rivet in the Statue of Liberty, which was built in France as a gift to America.

In 1888, Morton was elected vice president on Harrison's ticket, but he seems to have fallen into disfavor. During his presidency, Harrison tried to push through legislation that ensured voting rights for blacks in the South. As vice president, Morton was president of the Senate, but he apparently made little effort against a Democratic filibuster and the bill failed.

Reportedly, Harrison blamed Morton for the bill's failure, and he dropped him from the GOP ticket in 1892. Harrison was defeated in his bid for re–election. Was Morton's absence from the ticket a factor? There were several issues and a popular third–party candidate, Populist James Weaver, who carried four states (including one that joined the Union during Harrison's presidency and was participating in its first election). Three of those states had supported Harrison four years earlier.

Harrison also lost Morton's adopted state of New York, which was the largest state in the nation at the time, as well as his home state (Indiana) and the states of Wisconsin and Illinois, all of which had supported him in 1888. In the three–way race that year, no candidate received a majority of the vote in any of those states.

(New York, by the way, also was the adopted state of Harrison's new running mate, Whitelaw Reid, who was the editor of the New York Tribune for many years. Reid was born in Ohio, which voted for Harrison in both elections.)

I suppose it is anyone's guess whether Morton could have salvaged enough states for Harrison to win the election. But if Harrison had carried New York, Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois, he would have received enough electoral votes to win a second term.

Not long after leaving the vice presidency, Morton was back in politics as governor of New York. When he left that office, he became a real–estate investor.

Morton died on his 96th birthday. So far, he is the only president or vice president who died on his birthday. Only one vice president (John Garner) lived longer than he did, and Morton actually outlived five of his successors, all of whom were much younger.