What do the following men and women have in common?
Thomas Marshall
John Kern
Calvin Coolidge
Charles Bryan
Frank Knox
John Bricker
Earl Warren
William Miller
Spiro Agnew
Geraldine Ferraro
Sarah Palin
Each was his or her party’s nominee for vice president in the past 100 years (or will be this year) without an established national reputation. One became President, on the death of President Harding and was re-elected, President Coolidge. One served two terms as VP. One was appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. They had varying degrees of political experience. Two were a members of the House of Representatives, six were governors, one a former state senator and one was a newspaper publisher. Only Knox, who ran with Alf Landon and four years later became FDR’s Secretary of the Navy, and Warren grew in reputation in later years. None of them had been in the hunt for the Presidency before.
Who are the other nominees and what do they have in common?
Joseph Robinson
Franklin D. Roosevelt
John Nance Garner
Henry A. Wallace
Harry S. Truman
Alben W. Barkley
John Sparkman
Estes Kefauver
Lyndon B. Johnson
Hubert Humphrey
Edmund Muskie
Sargent Shriver
Walter Mondale
Lloyd Bentsen
Al Gore
Joe Lieberman
John Edwards
Joe Biden
James S. Sherman
Nicholas Butler
Charles Evans Hughes
Charles W. Fairbanks
Charles Dawes
Charles Curtis
Charles McNary
Richard Nixon
Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
Bob Dole
George H. W. Bush
Dan Quayle
Jack Kemp
Dick Cheney
Yes, they are all men (the glass ceiling was invisible during a great part of this time). Most of them were Senators. Gore, Nixon, Bush and Cheney served two terms as VP. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon and Bush were each later elected President. Truman and Johnson also first became President on the deaths of Roosevelt and Kennedy. Some of these men are little remembered today, but none of them were unknowns when they accepted the nomination. The least well known in recent memory was Dan Quayle, who served one term, and he was widely thought to be an odd choice by the first President Bush for that very reason.
The Vice Presidency is as powerful (Cheney) or as trivial (Garner, Marshall) as the will of the President and the character of the holder permit. The President may give the heartbeat away no preparation (Truman had been kept ignorant of the atomic bomb). The nominee may present us with a running mate who has just been exposed to 18 months of campaign scrutiny or someone who is a known pair of ’safe hands.’ But the nominee can also give us someone whose entire national exposure will be an intermittent sideshow over eight weeks.
Senator McCain has given us Governor Palin. The electorate knew nothing about her before and can now see only the surface appearances.
The appearances may not tell us much. When I lived there in the 80s, Alaska was a political mix of big money and garage-sale politics. Big Oil, independent commercial fisherman, Native Corporations, trappers and prospectors, small businesses, military, real estate boosters, leftover rolling stones, the pre-statehood Pioneer aristocracy, North Slope commuters, Ballard skippers, Inuit, Yupic, Athabascan, Haida and other villagers and their city cousins, and ‘there’s nothing on satellite, let’s go to town hall and give the mayor a hard time.’ Evangelicals, urban secular humanists, Mormons, Mensa Atheists, survivalists, apocalyptic environmentalists, hothouse horticulturalists, volunteer firefighters and paramedics, circuit riding judges, bush pilots, fishing guides, loggers, cabin fevered homeschoolers, recreational pilots running out of air with no place to land, alcoholics standing in 15 below waiting for the bars to reopen at 6. The Permanent Fund, the Pioneer Homes, the reverse income taxes, the pols cutting deals at the Baranof Hotel bar in Juneau. Homesteads, sheep stations in the Aleutians, abandoned military sites all over, ship wrecks. Lonely young men stuck here with time and money and no one to ask out. The Spenard Divorce, just add ammo. Everyone is an outsider to someone, but no one can be a stranger to anyone. The only way to stand out is to try to be ordinary. Private life and public life become blurred. Politics is personal. Payback time. Our turn. Favors. Everything is more intense, amplified in this small city of half a million spread out over a vast wilderness.
The reputation that the Governor enjoys (rooted out the old crooks of her own party) or suffers (I want him fired!) within Alaska reflects the unique political, social and economic conditions there. How well that translates to the national stage is uncertain. Not every stereotyped Red State, red meat, gun totting, Bible thumping, pro life, cut taxes, drill more oil, keep our troops in Iraq forever Republican has the actual gumption to move to Alaska. Life there is hard, the economy regularly crashes. And it just plain doesn’t feel comfortable finding yourself to the left of so many of your new neighbors. You might not even want to know quite so much about even their opinions that you do agree with.
For the stereotyped Blue State, vegan, economically anxious, war weary, save the planet, invest in education, Big Oil is Big Evil, no tax cuts for the rich Democrat, the surface appearance is enough to start planning the move to Canada, now.
The tweeners look at the appearance and simply shrug, ‘playing to his base, I suppose.’
The choice of an unknown trivializes the office and asks the electorate to believe that either the nominee will never have to step into the presidency or to take her readiness on faith. It says, ‘you have to trust my judgment on this.’
But it also says, ‘you have to question my judgment.’
John McCain is famous as the political maverick who doesn’t care what his party thinks, as the defiant prisoner who never gave in, never changed his mind, no matter how often he was beaten.
In reaching to the remoteness of Alaska for a national unknown, McCain sends some important messages:
1. Core Republican voters only care about right thinking on social issues.
2. Hillary voters only care about gender.
3. Independent voters don’t care about the veep
4. everyone else is going to vote against the ticket anyway
Mostly, though, John McCain is simply telling us ‘I really do not care what you think; my mind is made up. It doesn’t matter because she is not going to be doing anything important until I’m dead and then I don’t care. If it were up to me I wouldn’t even have a VP. All of this history about nominating someone with a national reputation is a bunch of bull. Get over it.’
That is not a good mind set for an out-of-touch old man with a short fuse who never admits to being wrong.
