Former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden is now the Democratic presidential nominee for 2020. He wasn’t my first, second, or even tenth choice out of the 16 or so people who were seeking the nomination a year ago. I never thought that he would be the nominee, but he is. To paraphrase former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “you go into a general election campaign with the candidate you have, not the candidate you want.” Okay, so the party will head into November’s election with a 77 year old man as its standard bearer. Yes, I will vote for him, but more importantly than voting for him, I will be voting for his running mate, who stands a very strong chance of becoming President before the 2024 general election.
Biden has committed to choosing a woman as his running mate. I guess he felt that he had to do this, since the primary campaign began with a record number of women seeking the nomination, but none of them prevailed. Between women, African Americans, Latinos and the LGBTQ community (full disclosure: I was a Pete Buttigieg supporter from day one), the Democrats were in full celebration of America’s diversity when the primary season began, but at the end of the day a senior citizen white man won. Now he and his advisors feel compelled to prove how forward looking the Democratic party is by nominating a woman as the VP candidate.
Becoming President via the Vice Presidency
Last year I read “Accidental Presidents” by Jared Cohen, which recounts the eight men (sorry ladies, no women) who became President upon the death of the incumbent. Cohen points out one chilling fact: presidential nominees pay very little attention to the temperment or qualifications of their running mates, using the VP slot as a way to “balance” the ticket, smooth over party factions or to appease disappointed also-rans who could cause trouble in the general election.
John Tyler-His Accidency
John Tyler was the first Vice President to become President via the death of a President. Balancing the ticket was the goal of Whig candidate William Henry Harrison, who chose US Senator John Tyler from Virginia as his running mate in 1840. Tyler, a slaveholder, balanced any abolitionist tendencies Harrison might have, thus appeasing those Whigs who believed in the “peculiar institution”, as human bondage was so quaintly referred to by those who were too genteel to use the word slavery. In 1840 Virginia had the most Electoral College votes of Southern states, so having Tyler on the ticket was a chance to run up the Whig party’s tally among slave holding states. Little if any attention was given to Tyler’s ability to become President, since no president had failed to complete his term in office, and the Whigs assumed that Harrison would continue this unbroken line of presidential continuity.
Assumptions, as any naval officer knows from bitter experience, are the mothers of all fuck ups, and the Whig Party fucked up royally by assuming that the 68 year old Harrison would survive a four year term in office. Given that this was the age of smallpox, diphtheria, polio, whooping cough, yellow fever and who the hell knows what else, and that Harrison was 68, why anyone expected this fossil to live four more years escapes reason, but politicians, like old church ladies who turn everything over to Jesus, are notorious for wishful thinking. Today Harrison is known for two things: giving the longest inaugural address and having the shortest presidential term in US history: thirty days. Harrison died from pneumonia and pleurisy on 4 April, 1841. Just goes to show what a two hour speech in freezing rain will do to a 68 year old man’s immune system.
The office of Vice President has one defined responsibility in the Constitution, which is to preside over the Senate and to cast a vote if the Senate is tied. Prior to the passage of the 25th Amendment, the only Constitutional guidance on what the Vice President did in case a President was removed from office was in Article II, which reads:
In case of the removal of the president from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President
President Harrison’s cabinet met an hour after his death, and they interpreted the words of Article II to mean that Vice President Tyler would be “Vice President acting President”. Tyler however said, “no go, homo”, and asserted that the Constitution gave him full and unqualified powers of office. With that interpretation in mind, he then took the next logical step and had himself sworn in as President.
For his assertive action in assuming the office of the Presidency Tyler was sneeringly referred to as “His Accidency”, and ultimately ended up splitting with the Whig Party and rejoining the Democratic Party in an attempt win the 1844 Presidential election, which he lost to Whig candidate John Tyler; however, his one lasting legacy was establishing the precedent that the Vice President becomes President upon the death or removal of the President. The following Vice Presidents acted upon the precedent set by Tyler:
- 1850-Millard Fillmore
- 1865-Andrew Johnson
- 1881-Chester Arthur
- 1901-Theodore Roosevelt
- 1923-Calvin Coolidge
- 1945-Harry Truman
- 1963-Lyndon Johnson
None of the men above were chosen for their ability to become President, and the following is a brief accounting of how they got the VP slot, along with how they conducted themselves upon assuming the Presidency.
Millard Fillmore
Whig Party presidential candidate Zachery Taylor chose Fillmore as his running mate because he was from New York and would “balance” the ticket. Taylor was from the slave state of Louisiana, and his sole claim to fame was that he had commanded the US forces that conquered and dismembered Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1848. That war was hugely unpopular in Northern states, since those states rightly assumed that the territory conqured from Mexico would lead to the expansion of slavery. Fillmore, who was Congressman from New York, a free state, had frequently declared slavery to be evil, but it was an evil beyond the powers of the Federal government to end. That kind of pussy statement made him the perfect running mate for a slaveowner.
Once in office Taylor treated Fillmore like a mushroom; keeping him in the dark and feeding him shit. After all, Taylor, unlike Harrison, was healthy and he hadn’t idiotically given a two hour inaugural address in a freezing rain, so why bother to keep his VP aware of how he was running the country? Taylor died on 9 July, 1850, probably from acute gastroenteritis, since Washington at the time had open sewers, the perfect breeding ground for deadly bacteria, which would then spread to the food and water supply.
Fillmore followed the precedent set by John Tyler and assumed the office of the presidency, and he inherited the mess that Taylor left behind: how to deal with the issue of slavery into the territories conquered during the Mexican-American War. Fillmore’s only time in office had been as a Congressman and Comptroller of New York, so he had no experience as an executive, thus depriving the nation of strong leadership at a time when the country was about to go to war over slavery. In keeping with his previous pussy statements on slavery being evil but the federal government didn’t have the power to correct said evil, Fillmore signed off on the Compromise of 1850. This act brought California into the Union as a free state, ended the slave trade in Washington, DC, allowed Texas to transfer a large portion of its terrtiory to the federal governemnt in exchange for Washington assuming Texas’s debts from the days when it was an independent nation, and forced all states, free or slave, to return runaway slaves to their owners.
Fillmore’s presidency can be summed up in one statement: he delayed the start of the Civil War by a decade.
Andrew Johnson
The election of 1864 took place while the country was still fighting the Civil War. Northern Democrats ran on a platform of ending the war, and they chose former Union General George McCllelan as their candidate. Lincoln, who had fired McClellan twice for ineptitude during the Peninsular Campaign and the Battle of Antietam, was thinking of the future after the war was over. This farsighted vision led him and the Republican Party to do two things: merge with War Democrats from border states and run as the National Union Party, and to replace Vice President Hannibal Hamlin with War Democrat Andrew Johnson. War Democrats were Democrats from slave states who favored continuing the war to preserve the Union, whereas Peace Democrats wanted an immediate end to hostilities.
Lincoln chose Johnson because he was from Tennessee, had served as military governor of that portion of the state which fell under Union control during the Civil War, and he hoped that having a Southerner on the ticket would help to “bind up the nation’s wounds”, as he so eloquently stated in his second inaugural address. Lincoln was an exceptional politician in that he didn’t hold grudges, and he understood the need for forgiveness, even while he ruthlessly prosecuted the war until the Confederacy was destroyed.
Unfortunately Lincoln didn’t take Johnson’s temperament into consideration when he chose him as his running mate for the 1864 election, and even more unfortunately Lincoln was assassinated five days after Lee surrendered. Johnson, a vindictive man who was more interested in asserting his authority and settling scores than he was in restoring the nation after a brutal civil war, ended up being the first President to be impeached.
In his timeless Gettysburg Address Lincoln said, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” He had no idea that the man he chose to be his Vice President would be nothing but a white supremecist who had no interest in binding up the nation’s wounds, leaving those wounds to fester well into the twentieth century.
Chester Arthur
James Garfield, the 1880 Republican nominee, chose Chester Arthur of New York to “balance” his ticket. In 1880 Republicans were split between those who wanted a Civil Service composed of people who earned their jobs via competitive examination and merit, and those who liked the old spoils system , with the party that won the White House awarding offices to party loyalists. The people who believed in the patronage system were called Stalwarts. Garfield wasn’t firmly in either camp, which is why he won the nomination, and he picked Arthur, who believed in patronage, as his running mate. Once again ticket balancing was deemed more important than the qualifications of the man to become President, and once again a Vice President had to step into the vacuum. On 2 July 1881Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a deranged office seeker, who after firing shouted, “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President!”
Garfield, who had been shot in the back, wasn’t mortally wounded, but his death was guaranteed by the first doctors who arrived on the scene. None of these “doctors” washed their hands before plunging their filthy fingers into Garfield’s wound. Guiteau’s bullet had shattered one of Garfield’s ribs before lodging in his abdomen. Over the next few weeks Garfield’s abdominal wound became septic, and the infection was made worse as his idiotic doctors kept probing his wound with unwashed hands.
Garfield lingered for 80 days after he was shot, and during that time Vice President Arthur had no authority to act as President (no 25th Amendment!). Congress was not in session during this period, so the country was essentially leaderless while Garfield slowly died from sepsis and medical malpractice. Arthur’s sole office before becoming Vice President had been as Collector of the Custom House of the Port of New York, and he got that lucrative job for one reason: he was a dedicated member of the New York Republican Party and he did what the party bosses told him to do. Garfield and Arthur disliked and distrusted each other, since Garfield believed in Civil Service Reform and Arthur didn’t, so Garfield, like his predecessors, treated his Vice President with studied contempt.
Despite his opposition to Civil Service Reform, Arthur was prescient enough to see that having a president murdered by a disappointed office seeker, no matter how insane said office seeker was, served as a clarion call for ending the spoils system. The fact that Guiteau had shouted “Arthur will be President” after shooting Garfield also served as a sharp spur to Arthur’s political conscience. He pressed Congress to enact the Pendleton Act, which awarded civil service jobs to those who passed competitive examinations, and when Congress passed the bill, Arthur appointed men who solidly believed in reform to the newly created Civil Service Commission.
Theodore Roosevelt
President William McKinley , who was seeking re-election in 1900, chose New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt because his first Vice President, Garret Hobart, died in 1899. Roosevelt, who worked to break up monopolies in New York, and who also firmly believed in civil service reform, was despised by the New York’s Republican political machine. When the 1900 Republican convention opened, the New York Republicans pushed to get Roosevelt on the ticket so that they could get him out of New York. The plan worked, and Teddy was in the nothing job of Vice President when President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in September of 1901. While Roosevelt hadn’t been selected for his ability to assume the office, which was odd given that two presidents had been murdered in the space of 36 years, he became the first Vice President to win election after assuming the presidency, and he is regarded as one of our most successful Presidents. Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to settle the Russo-Japanese War. He also orchestrated Panama’s separation from Colombia, thus paving the way for the construction of the Panama Canal, and he concluded the Philippine insurrection in America’s newly acquired Asain colony. Roosevelt thoroughly transformed the office of the Presidency into an office of activism, acting on what he read and the concerns people brought to his attention. The Food and Drug Administration was created because Roosevelt read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, which was a searing indictment of the horrific filth that was endemic in meat packing plants.
Calvin Coolidge
At the 1920 Republican Convention Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding was picked by the party bosses in a smoke filled room. Convention delegates chose Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge as Harding’s running mate. Coolidge had gained national fame with his handling of the 1919 Boston police strike, and his statement to union organizers: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone , anywhere, any time.” This action fit perfectly with the GOP’s pro-business/anti union stance, making Coolidge an ideal running mate for Harding. Coolidge’s statement that “the business of America is business” further endeared him to the Republican leadership, who had grown weary of Woodrow Wilson’s “my way or the highway” progressive presidency. Coolidge’s integrity served him well when he assumed the presidency upon the death of Harding on 2 August, 1923, as Harding’s administration had been plagued by scandal and malfeasance, culminating in the Teapot Dome scandal and Harding’s affair and love child with Nan Britton. Coolidge spent much of his presidency restoring dignity to the office that had been tarnished by Harding’s scandals, but he failed to understand and deal with the plight of farmers who were burdened by crushing debt, nor did he understand that the financial bubble of the “Roaring Twenties” would lead to economic catastrophe.
Harry Truman
Franklin Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, and he was quite happy with Henry Wallace, his Vice President, but many Democratic party leaders and bosses viewed Wallace as a crank (he was). Those leaders closest to FDR were also aware of an alarming fact: Roosevelt was dying. Twelve years of leading a country out of the Great Depression and into World War II had taken its toll. FDR was suffering from congestive heart failure and extreme hypertension when he ran in 1944, so his choice of a running mate became crucial. VP Wallace was viewed as too soft on how to handle the Soviet Union after the war was over, and his views on integration were anathema to Southern Democrats, who held the whip hand over the party. Party bosses bluntly told FDR that Wallace had to go, and they suggested Missouri Senator Harry Truman. Truman and FDR didn’t know each other, and Truman’s one contact with the Roosevelt administration came about as a result of Truman’s chairmanship of the Committee on Military Affairs. This committee, which oversaw war contracts, became aware of the Army spending millions of dollars on something called the Manhattan Project. An investigation into the project couldn’t determine what the money was being spent on, and repeated questions by the committee only resulted in vague answers. Finally Truman confronted the Secretary of War about the project, threatening to go public with the “waste”, until a direct message from President Roosevelt told him to back off and that the project was vital to national defense. Truman and Roosevelt had a grand total of two meetings after both men were inaugurated on 20 January, 1945, and it wasn’t until after FDR’s death that Truman learned what the Manhattan Project was: developing the world’s first nuclear weapon.
The country got lucky with FDR’s selection of Truman as VP. No man entered the Oval Office less prepared to lead a country fighting a world war, but Truman rose to the occasion. Nazi Germany ceased to exist three weeks after he assumed office, and Imperial Japan was destroyed four months later. Truman, who received daily reports on the sanguinary nature of the conquest of Okinawa, approved the detonation of two nuclear weapons on Japan. Truman stood up to the Soviet Union’s attempt to force the United States, France and the United Kingdom out of West Berlin in 1948, and he created NATO in 1949. His decision to use force in Korea gave credibility to the newly created United Nations, which forcibly confronted aggression. Truman’s creation of the Department of Defense and the National Security Council, along with the CIA and NSA enabled the United States to confront Stalin’s plans for global conquest. He was also foreward looking on race relations in the United States, issuing an executive order desegregating the armed forces in 1948, while he was running for the presidency in a campaign that all of the “experts” had Thomas Dewey, the GOP nominee, already measuring the drapes in the Oval Office. The fact that Truman was able to win the 1948 election with a Democratic Party that had fractured into a segregationist Dixiecrat Party headed by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, and a leftist Progressive Party headed by former VP Henry Wallace, combined with his pragmatic leadership in the face of numerous crises, demonstrated that FDR made the right choice, even though he didn’t give it much thought.
Lyndon Johnson
Given Jack Kennedy’s health problems (Addison’s disease, near death from spinal fusion surgery in 1956) one would think that he would have given considerable thought to the man he would pick as running mate. From numerous accounts it appears that he didn’t, but he was shrewd enough to know that a 42 year old Catholic from Massachusetts needed a running mate with gravitas and the ability to bring in enough Electoral College votes to win, particularly from Southern states. After Kennedy won the Democratic nomination at the convention in LA, he apparently came to two conclusions: Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson might be an impediment to getting his legislative agenda accomplished, and Johnson would lock up the South’s Electoral College votes. Johnson accepted Kennedy’s offer to be VP, but he cagily worked to get the Texas legislature to pass a bill allowing him to run for VP and his Senate seat at the same time, suggesting that he didn’t have that much faith in Kennedy’s ability to win. Kennedy did win, and Johnson was VP on 22 November, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
When it came to getting bills passed by Congress, there was no other man more capable than Lyndon Johnson. He was the most effective and powerful Senate Majority Leader in the history of that quarrelsome nest of egotistical vipers, and he jump started Kennedy’s legislative agenda, which was moribound at the time of his assassination. The Civil Rights Bill and tax cut bills were still stuck in committee when Johnson assumed the presidency. One week after Kennedy’s death Johnson was preparing a speech to a joint session of Congress. He wanted to emphasize the need to pass the Civil Rights Bill as a tribute to President Kennedy. As he and his staff were drafting his speech, one of his aides commented that, “a president shouldn’t spend his time and power on lost causes, no matter ho worthy those causes might be.” “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Lyndon Johson replied.
Over the next five years Johnson used his legislative legerdemain to transform the character of the United States. Within the space of 18 months Johnson passed a tax cut bill that lowered the marginal top tax rate from 90% to 70%, the Civil Rights Bill, the Voting Rights Bill and Medicare/Medicaid. He also focused his attention on lowering the number of Americans living in poverty, vastly expanded job training for the underprivileged, and passed more education assistance bills than any president in American history. Even after he announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection in 1968, he still managed to get Congress to pass the Civil Rights Housing bill, which bans racial discrimination with regards to housing. No president since has been as successful at bending Congress to his will and the will of the voters.
Johnson also used his experience as Senate Majority Leader to dramatically improve the continuity of government. While he was Majority Leader he worked with President Eisenshower to approve an alternative location for Congress to meet in the event of a nuclear attack on Washington. The secret bunker, located at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, would have allowed all 535 members of Congress to meet and continue legislative action in the event of Washington’s destruction. Johnson also worked closely with Indiana Senator Birch Bayh to write the 25th Amendment, and to push for its ratification, which was achieved in four years.
While Vietnam will forever cast a shadow over Johnson’s presidency, it should be remembered that he kept all of Kennedy’s foreign policy advisors after assuming office. These were the men who advised him to increase the number of advisors and to begin bombing North Vietnam. Yes, it was Johnson’s decision, but he was acting on the advice of the “Best and the Brightest” as David Halbestrom so acidly put it in his Pulitzer prize winning book. Foreign affairs was never Johnson’s forte, and tragically he destroyed his presidency and his party in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam.
What Biden Needs in a VP
There is increasing social media and even some mainstream media chatter that Biden should pick Stacey Abrams as his running mate. Abrams, who very narrowly lost the Georgia gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp, who is a total jackass, is an African American woman who has made voting rights her signature cause. While I applaud Abrams for her work, she’s not the right choice for Biden’s running mate. It’s been 57 years since Kennedy was assassinated, and 46 years since Ford became President in the wake of Nixon’s resignation. This is the longest period this nation has experienced without a President dying in office, so the odds are that with a 77 year old in the Oval Office, we’ll either experience presidential death or disability before the 2024 election. While I admire Abrams, I do not believe that she is qualified to become President. Her political career has consisted solely of being a state legislator and minority leader in the Georgia General Assembly. Biden’s VP needs to be someone who has been elected to either statewide office (governor or Senator), or someone who is currently on her second Senatorial term. If the Trump presidency has taught us one thing it’s this: inexperience and a lack of holding electoral office before assuming the presidency leads to disaster.
Biden will undoubtedly hear that he needs to bring “excitement and energy” to his ticket. I’m calling bullshit on that. After four years of a no talent ass clown in the Oval Office, combined with a pandemic and a global depression, I’m willing to bet the people want calm, steady leadership. The next four to five years will be some of the most challenging in the history of the United States. Now is not the time to pick someone solely because they have name recognition or have a cool “brand” (what the fuck does that mean?) on Instagram or Twitter. We got lucky with Truman and Teddy Roosevelt, and kind of lucky with Lyndon Johnson. We can’t afford another mistake along the lines of Fillmore and Andrew Johnson, or a placeholder like John Tyler, Chester Arthur and Calvin Coolidge.
On 4 March 1933, newly inaugurated President Franklin Roosevelt had a chat with his mother in the White House. Banks across the country were failing due to an inability to meet depositors’s demands for cash. Unemployment was at 27% , and the general feeling among Americans was that capitalism and the “American Dream” had failed. Mrs. Roosevelt said, “Franklin, if you fail, you’ll be the Democratic president of the United States.” Fixing his mother with a cold and determined stare, FDR responded with, “Mother, if I fail, I’ll be the last President of the United States, period.”
If Biden makes the wrong choice for his VP, those words may become a reality.