The Democratic Presidential ticket : Obama-Clinton?
At the start of the American republic, the President and Vice-President were not running mates, but the people with the top two blocs of votes in the electoral college. This led to trouble, not under Washington but under the much-underrated and 'unflashy' John Adams, who had to put up with Thomas Jefferson behaving badly at every opportunity with quite a degree of glee. Adams was a one term President, and as soon as Jefferson, who tended to operate under cover of revolutionary-sounding populism, got the chance, he changed the system and appointed a stooge.
That has been the default position of the Vice-President ever since. As John McCain once rather memorably put it, the idea was to hang around, go to funerals, support the President and stay quiet. The founders didn't elaborate on the office; they didn't even say whether the Vice-President should actually be President if a President were incapacitated. That came when future Vice-Presidents simply asserted that that was what the bare-bones constitution meant.
So it has been rare to have major disagreements between President and Vice-President that poison an administration. In the twentieth century, since America's rise to world dominance, the Jeffersonian paradigm has been the rule. McKinley's key manager was not happy with Theodore Roosevelt, whom he actually got elected V-P to neuter him (a bad mistake from his point of view given the assassin's bullet that killed McKinley) and FDR regretted deeply running with Henry Wallace, and didn't bother to meet Truman at all until near the end. Woodrow Wilson's Vice-President, famously, said that all he wanted was a good cigar, and went white when he was actually required to put himself on 'stand-by', preferring that Wilson's wife ran things.
Harry Truman, a very traditional democrat, appointed the old, quiet and decent Alben Barkley (thanks to whose grandchildren the V-P is now called a Veep). I thought today though of two huge characters of the twentieth century who endured the Vice Presidency on hearing that Hillary had won in Pennsylvania; Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.
Eisenhower spent a good deal of his time trying to get Nixon off the ticket he had appointed him to in 1952. The effort not to be thrown off, and to mix mawkish concern for his boss's health with the contempt and annoyance that stemmed from his position was what made Nixon who he was in many ways. Similarly, LBJ's volcanic energies were deeply frustrated in Blair House, which I think was his eyrie as V-P (Veeps now reside at the Naval Observatory).
Kennedy was so unnerved by LBJ that his brother spent a good deal of time trying to get Lyndon's crony, Bobby Baker, and therefore Lyndon, indicted, and someone like Terry Sanford appointed in 1964 instead. Had JFK not gone to Dallas, it is very likely that the sad tale of antagonism and dislike at the top of the presidential ticket would never have been repeated.
The lessons of the LBJ/Nixon vice-presidencies certainly influenced the choice of Humphrey, Agnew, Dole, Mondale and Bush as Veeps, and also boosted the emollient qualities of Rockefeller, Bentsen, Shriver, Stockdale, and Gore. Lieberman, Kemp, Ferraro and Miller, in 2000, 96, '84 and 64, of course, stand out. A Gore administration or a dole administration, in my view, would have had terrible trouble with the Veep. Poor Humphrey, who was not as ridiculous as people made him out to be, spent most of his time in the office being humiliated by LBJ.
There are lots of people who think Obama and Hillary Clinton should enter into a joint ticket. I think that the lesson of Nixon and Johnson is that this would be disastrous, and would paralyse government should they win. I also think that it would accentuate both their negatives rather than their positives, and lead to the same confusion as the SDP-Liberal alliance demonstrated in a minor key of farce in Britain in 1987. How easy a game would it be to play them off against each other, and to stop Clintonian narcissism from occasioning Obama's somewhat diffident insults?
And if I were Obama on an Obama-Clinton ticket I would go nowhere near Dallas.
Still, this sort of question is going to come up again and again, and I thought that it was worth posting on right now, as a way of accompanying lunch, just to put things in context. Quite a few American Presidents have gained the office, two have resigned (Calhoun and Agnew, in different circumstances) and some tickets have ended up in jail or at each other's throats without ever meeting, like Woodhull and Douglas. One was even two; Greeley ran on two tickets in 1872.
There's a thought. Republicans should simply nominate Hillary as a Vice-President, and leave the republic to confusion as she and McCain sweep in during a McCain-Clinton/Obama-Clinton contest. It would be more honest than pretending he is going to go on that long or that she has much to do with her party's foreign policy.
Comments
I found out about your blog from a comment you left at the Contentious Centrist.
When you write, “It would be more honest than pretending he is going to go on that long or that she has much to do with her party's foreign policy.”
I think Obama’s chances of winning the general election are not very good. There are too many blue dog democrats like myself who simply will not vote for the man. Which brings me to your comment on Clinton, her foreign policy positions are favorable to many Democrats outside of “progressive” places like Berkeley, California.
The way our presidential elections are structured it will be difficult, if not impossible, for a Democrat—even Obama—to win in the deep south. Those states have been solidly Republican or “red” for decades. Nor is McCain going to take any of the solidly Democratic or “blue” states. Both parties realize the action is in the swing or “purple” states, which are the states where is Obama is doing less well than Clinton.
I personally think McCain is going to do well. Of course I may be wrong, but I suspect most Americans are going to realize the “change” candidate is simply another elitist politician who wants to raise their taxes, take their guns, and belittle them for believing in God. Not a winning strategy in these United States of America.
Have a nice day.
--The New Centrist (no relation to Contentious Centrist aside from similar political perspective)
The electoral point is this; the South has been very 'red' for a long time, you're right--mostly since McGovern.
But what if the black community, and the young, and the new southern suburbs, actually turned out and voted for a centrist democrat, or one who could genuinely appeal to a new political generation and to the older parts of the Democrat coalition? Obama at one point hinted that he could be that candidate.
I fear your answer might be that neither Clinton nor Obama can do that, because they both seem to appeal to antagonistic groups. Obama particularly seems to have a problem with the white working class whom Democrats need to win over.
I'd also point to Obama's huge potential strength in the west and the north and midwest; precisely your purple states.
Again, though, you might note that the longer your media, which I share Glenn Greenwald's cynical take on, spits its nonsense, the more that chance will slip away from Obama.
My wider worry is simple. The USA is living way beyond its means. The prospect before us is that of stagflation. This combination of slowdown and monetary inflation has as a principal cause the policies of deficit and debt that American Adminstrations of both stripes have pursued in a world of relatively cheap oil for decades.
In addition, the global demographic shift towards a poor, angry world of young men with no jobs and Islamists to turn to can't be met with grotesque expenditure on weapons that just encourage your politicians and lobbyists to throw young American men and women into mincing-machines in the bloody parts of the world. You need serious, intelligent policies of the sort that Eisenhower, and Kennedy in his better moments pursued.
A candidate like Hillary, who divides, lies, and is in the pay of lobbyists even more than McCain, who doesn't seem a well man to me, can't be a good thing.
I think Barack Obama isn't another Jimmy Carter; I am young enough not to remember Jimmy Carter as 'Jimmy Carter', though he is highly regarded here. I just don't want a republic like America, where I have many friends, to slip further into this long leaden age of decline, blood and iron populism, and insane debt.
So, I suspect like yourself, I wish you had better candidates to vote for. Of them all, I think Obama is the least bad--so far. I wouldn't ban your guns, or encourage higher taxes for anything other than deficit reduction, and as you can tell I appreciate religion too. Maybe someone should graft Ron Paul's DNA into Obama for me. Do I have any mad scientist readers?
Have a very good day yourself,
Martin