About That Bucket

John Nance Garner died in 1966 at the venerable age of 98 having spent eight of his years as vice president of the United States.

Garner held that office from 1933 to 1941 during the first two terms of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, having agreed to accept nomination for it to drop his own presidential candidacy at the 1932 Democratic National Convention when FDR found himself short of the two-thirds delegate majority then needed to gain the presidential nomination.

That rule changed in 1936 to require 50 percent plus one of all delegates. Imagine if the two-thirds rule remained today. Yes, you’re right there’d never be a nominee.

Garner’s job in his eight years as vice president consisted of doing exactly what the Constitution says a vice president should do, almost nothing. The document says the job is to preside over the U.S. Senate (only on ceremonial occasion in reality) and in the event of a Senate deadlock break it by voting. In his time in a tied Senate Garner had the 50th Senate vote. In ours, since the admission of Hawaii and Alaska as states, the vice president holds the 51st vote if needed by his president and his party.

Otherwise, Garner, a three-decade veteran of the House where he served one term as speaker, did nothing as vice president. That is the way presidents pretty much always employed their veeps. In that, FDR was definitely no exception.

When FDR yielded to his party’s big-city bosses at the 1944 convention that at the end of his unprecedented third term nominated him for an unprecedented fourth term,  he wearily agreed to their terms.

He dropped his third-term vice president, New Dealer Henry Wallace, from the 1944  national ticket and accepted the bosses’ non-descript, uncontroversial regular choice, Missouri Sen. Harry Truman, whose political bona fides originated with Kansas City Democratic boss James Pendergrast.

They won of course but after the two were inaugurated Jan. 20, 1945, FDR met just once with his new vice president. Otherwise, he didn’t see, talk with, or think about Truman before dying on April 12.

So ignored and in the dark was Vice President Truman that on his first full day as president he had a visit from Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall. The chief came to the White House to tell the new president about the Manhattan Project – the one busy inventing the atomic bomb.

Nothing says more about the irrelevancy of the vice presidency through most of American history than that Truman had no knowledge of the Manhattan Project, knowledge FDR saw no need for him to have and indeed didn’t trust him to have.

Only lately have vice presidents become public figures of any prominence or been given actual real work to do by their presidents.

When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960 his president, Dwight D. Eisenhower was asked at a news conference if he could name one idea Nixon had contributed to his presidency.

“Give me a week and I might think of one,” Ike said, then laughed – a rather cynical estimate of the man he kept waiting in the wings for eight years.

John F. Kennedy won the election that year and spent the next three years allowing his brother Robert F. Kennedy to humiliate the man who RFK had tried to stop from joining JFK on the ticket when the future president offered him the vice presidency after defeating Lyndon B. Johnson’s late bid for the 1960 Democratic nomination.

Before the good Bobby, we like to remember, there was the bad Boddy. The one who worked for Joseph R. McCarthy and served as a political hitman for JFK. For that Bobby, determined to make him a forgotten, forlorn, ridiculed figure as vice president, LBJ had only an abiding, searing hatred. But then between them, as is so often said in politics, what goes around, comes around — and sometimes goes around again.

Lately, we’ve seen vice presidents emerge in different ways from the state of suspended political animation or plain irrelevance that historically was their role unless and until ill health or gunshots (or, in one case, scandal) intervened to elevate them to the White House.

George H.W. Bush languished in Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” Al Gore played dull partner to Bill Clinton’s effervescent star. Dick Cheney confused himself with the actual president, doing neither his nor George W. Bush’s reputation any good. Joe Biden became Capitol Hill whisperer for Barrack Obama, who dissuaded him from running four years ago  — and perhaps sparing us all this. Now? now there is Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s jumping toad.

But, back to John Nance Garner and something he said. The only thing history particularly remembers him saying.

The vice-presidency said Garner, “is not worth a bucket of warm piss.”

The vice presidency has changed since Garner’s time.  That has to be acknowledged. There is more to do because we expect presidents to give vice presidents something real to do. These days the job comes with a fancy residence while social media and cable TV news watch the vice president as olden-day newspapers never did Texas Jack Garner.

It is also generally acknowledged that anyone who carries Garner’s proverbial bucket for eight years is entitled to and presumed to have a reasonable claim to the next presidential nomination of his party — so far it’s been only men in the second office.

That is not necessarily so this time. Why? This is a one-term presidency. No one can say it. Everyone knows it. That means in 18 months if he becomes president Biden will begin to sprout the wings of a lame-duck.

His vice president will have had the benefit of no more than two years in the office, subject to the whim of events that the coronavirus proves are beyond prediction before the next campaign begins. In that short space, she cannot presume to be cloaked in the mantle of her party’s 2024 presidential nomination and there will be many others who will want it.

Further, to allow her or anyone else to put together a 2024 campaign for president after two one-term presidencies, Biden will need to make his retirement clear no later than 18 months before the election, preferably two years before.

He’ll have to do that lest those champing at the bit to run seem disloyal to him before he formally says he’s leaving and to give them sufficient time to organize campaigns and run. After this destructive presidency or a new one, with either fore-ordained to end one way or another in four years, 2024 will be an election to decide the much longer-term future of the nation. It will be firey election, even more viscerally critical than 2020 if that is imaginable.

Moreover – wish him well and good health — Biden will be 78 years old on Inauguration Day,  and age 82 on the next in 2024. People die in those years. Whoever he chooses, Biden best assure the American people can imagine her as president from the get-go.

Then too, Republican presidential wannabees have no reason to wait. If Biden is elected, they will begin running on Jan. 20, 2021, getting a head start and barking at his heels all the way.

In this view then, the woman Joe Biden chooses to be vice president has no automatic lock and barely any claim to be the next nominee. She will have to run and run hard if that is her ambition. She will likely face a large field of candidates for the 2024 Democratic nomination, including some we’ve seen before and some who might well serve the first two years with her in a Biden administration.

So as we await former Vice President Joe Biden’s choice to be his Joe Biden we know that he locked himself in early into choosing a woman and that fate and events militate that he chooses or is likely feeling pressed to choose a Black woman as his running mate.

A few others who are not Black are mentioned, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, who is Asian-American, or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.  But the heavy betting expects a Black woman and reduces to a few that include Sen. Kamala Harris, several congresswomen, a mayor or two, former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacy Abrams, and former National Security Advisor and U.S. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

The point of this writing is not to guess but to appraise which one Biden might announce by Aug. 10, with his party’s truncated convention starting Aug. 17. Conventional wisdom says it will be a Black woman. Joe Biden is a conventional politician. Begin with that.

That this writer, who thinks himself generally conversant in things political, unaided can not recall their names, perhaps underscores that the congresswomen who have been mentioned have meager national recognition or political standing to bring much to the ticket except the question, “Who is she?” Then too, has anyone ever gone from any City Hall to the national ticket? A rhetorical question.

The times demand or should demand a known name, a credible backup to a president who would be the oldest ever to take the oath of office, a man who even in good health will leave the White House past age 80.

Therefore very much relevant is that sometimes vice presidents become president. It’s happened nine times – 1841, 1850, 1865, 1881, 1901, 1923, 1945, 1963, 1975.

Then, back to Biden’s choices.

Abrams has worked hard to make her name known since losing the Georgia governorship in 2018. She made herself a national political figure as a voting rights advocate. That’s good – good for democracy, good for her. Nonetheless, she lacks national experience or wide public recognition outside politics and has offended many by pressing Biden with a frontal campaign for vice president. She represents an ideal and an idea but lacks qualifications for the presidency.

Susan Rice has a distinguished career and experience in foreign affairs and national security but no electoral political experience, no expertise in domestic policy – paramount in the presidency after this extraordinary mess but —  but she has one great big huge, enormous political boulder weighing her down.

That’s Benghazi.

Republicans, as is their habit these days with women, would figuratively at least, stone her because Benghazi is a fiction they refuse to let die. If the choice is Rice, they will sing gleefully of Benghazi, led by the choral director of their misogynistic glee club, Trump. Benghazi weighs even on her potential candidacy for Secretary of State, never mind the national ticket.

Why in the world would Joe Biden bring that problem into his campaign? Why would anyone? Why would he give Republicans such a big opportunity to change the national conversation back to that, back to Hillary Clinton?

So does it reduce to Kamala Harris? She is a senator from the largest state in the nation, which has a Democratic governor to protect the Senate seat if she moves out and up from it.

She has the national stature of a senator and the TV exposure that comes with it and makes for name and face recognition. She has considerable recognition from her campaign for president. Yes, it was awkward and failed, but as a consequence, most people have heard of her and, unlike Abrams, she has been steadfast in deflecting attention from the possibility, supporting Biden while doing her bit to win the Senate.

So will it be Harris? I don’t know. Only Joe Biden, maybe also Jill Biden, and perhaps a very few others close to them know who is likely to emerge the choice.

Whoever it is, she will have but slim advantage looking past 2020 to 2024.  Still, it is in the nature of politics that among the very first things to be written about her 2020 vice-presidential candidacy will be whether she is a credible 2024 candidate for president.

The vice presidency is after all is said and done, worth more now than John Nance Garner’s estimate of it.