Vice President was a different topic, though. For one thing, you really don’t campaign for the job so much as you campaign for the Presidential candidate. You only have to be in campaign mode for the summer and fall, maybe four months. After that, you either lose and go home, or you win and go to sleep until the President dies. In my case, as a Congressman, I would need to run two campaigns, one for Vice President and the other as Representative of the Maryland Ninth. It looked as if the Democratic candidate for my House seat was as ham-handed as some of his predecessors, so I was reasonably confident I would win again. If I lost as VP, I would still have my day job. If I won, they’d have a special election to replace me. That’s one of the reasons Presidential nominees often ask Senators to be a VP; if they pick one who isn’t up for re-election, a loss doesn’t mean he’s out of a job.
One of the best reasons to be Vice President is if you want to become the President! If the President is good and successful (Reagan) his Vice President (Bush) is a shoo-in. However, if the President is unsuccessful or unpopular (Johnson) it’s a much tougher row to hoe. Hubert Humphrey did not beat Dick Nixon. Still, it’s good for name recognition. More than a few failed VP nominees have then gone on to run for President.
Vice Presidential selection is as much of an art as it is a science. At one point in our history, you selected a nominee who would complement the Presidential nominee. If the top guy was a northerner, the other guy was a southerner. Mike Dukakis from Massachusetts selected Lloyd Bentsen from Texas, for example. (The same thing applied with JFK and LBJ, curiously enough.) Maybe you select a moderate (George Bush) to tone down a conservative (Reagan) or maybe you select somebody who can carry an important state for you (Ike picking Californian Nixon, or JFK and LBJ again.)
That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, you get some very strange results. Kennedy and Johnson had just come off a brutal primary season, and they hated each other’s guts. Supposedly, Kennedy used Johnson to get him the critical Texas votes in the election, but I also heard that the election was rigged by Mayor Daley and the Chicago machine and a wonderful graveyard vote count.
It is actually much truer that the VP nominee rarely helps and almost always hurts. Dan Quayle looked like an eager little kid next to Bush 41 and Sarah Palin was a whack job with the IQ of a mouse. One of the worst examples was in 1972, when George McGovern selected Thomas Eagleton as his choice, only to have it discovered that Eagleton had received psychiatric treatment for depression. He had to be replaced, which did wonders for McGovern’s campaign after he announced he would back Eagleton “100 percent!” Certainly, with my ‘billionaire murderer’ stigma, there was no way anybody would ever want me running.
We were finishing our wine when the girls came downstairs and found us still snuggling on the couch. They were in sweatpants and t-shirts, and Holly asked, “What are you doing?”
Marilyn giggled and answered, “I’m snuggling with my sweetie!”
“Mom! Oh, that is so disgusting!”
I bit my tongue to keep from laughing. Marilyn said, “Give me a break! Where do you think you two came from?”
“GROSS!”
Molly chimed in, “I think I’m going to vomit!”
The pair of them made gagging noises and headed towards the kitchen. Marilyn giggled again, and groped me through my pants. “Gross!” she said. “Want to go upstairs and see if we can be disgusting?”
I snorted in laughter, and led her up the stairs. “As long as we don’t vomit!” I whispered.
It became doubly curious a few weeks later, when on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, my name was mentioned as a ‘long shot’ candidate. I was considered a leader in the House (as Whip that was true enough, I suppose, though after less than a full two year term you really couldn’t call me ‘tried and tested’) and a leading intellectual in the young conservative movement. That one had me scratching my head, since I wasn’t all that conservative. Monday morning Marty was asking me about it, and the only thing we could come up with was that somebody was using my name to drive their own agenda. It was certain that nobody had approached me from the Bush campaign.
A week later Fletcher Donaldson tracked me down and called me to ask me my thoughts on being on the short list. “Fletcher, if I was on the short list, don’t you think somebody would have told me? Where are you getting this stuff?” He refused to tell me, and I let Marty and Marilyn in on this latest rumor. In most cases, being known as being on the short list was considered a good thing. It showed you to be a ‘serious’ leader worthy of consideration for higher office, and who wouldn’t want that? I’d even heard of Congressmen and Senators lobbying Presidential nominees to leak that they were in the short list, so that it would help them in their regular re-election bid.
The second week of May Marty announced that I had an appointment with a couple of staffers from Governor Bush’s election campaign, but it was to be in the Whip’s office. In some ways this didn’t surprise me; in fact if they hadn’t wanted to meet with the Whip it would have surprised me more. I took the subway train from my office in Rayburn over to the Whip’s office in the Capitol. What did surprise me, once they had been shown in and we seated ourselves, was when they announced that they weren’t from the campaign, per se, but were from Dick Cheney’s office. “Congressman,”, one of them started, “we wanted to talk to you about whether or not you’d be interested in becoming the Vice Presidential nominee.”
I tried to keep the surprise off my face. This definitely wasn’t what I had suspected the conversation was to be about. “Is that a job offer?” I asked, smiling.
“That might be a little premature,” commented the other man. “We’re just curious about your thoughts on the rumors floating around the Capitol these days.”
“I’ve heard those rumors. I’ve been curious about them, too. I know I didn’t start them, so who did? Any ideas gentlemen?”
Staffer Number One simply smiled and shook his head. “Not really, Congressman.” Yes really, we leaked it.
My mind was racing at this point. Was this part of the selection process? Leak a name and see what happens? Does the candidate start some kind of response? Does he begin pushing his name in the press, or stating he doesn’t want the job, or complaining about the other candidates? So far I hadn’t done any of those things. My responses had all been a variation of two themes, and I gave them both again. “Well, of course I want to do anything I can to help Governor Bush in his bid for the White House. I’m just surprised that my name ever came up when there are so many much higher profile candidates.”
“Congressman, you never actually came out in support of Governor Bush during the primaries. Why is that?” asked Number Two.
I gave a noncommittal shrug. “It was always my position that I would support the eventual winner. My concern was for the future. If I supported the Governor, I’ve just made Senator McCain unhappy, and I have to work with him. If I support Senator McCain, I have the same issue with President Bush if the Governor wins, and even if he loses, I didn’t want to insult his father, the first President Bush, who I hold in the highest respect.” That seemed a decent enough argument. “Besides, I’m damn near the only Republican in the Maryland Ninth, and I don’t think I am going to sway anybody else in the state to vote Republican. I suspect Maryland will vote for Al Gore.” I gave a wry smile as I said this.