The Saddest Conventioneer

July 22, 2016

One dreadful convention down, one to go.

Political conventions used to be significant events. Network television ran them gavelto-gavel, with reporters in unwieldy headsets roaming the convention floor looking for people in goofy hats.

It gave us some interesting television. Now it gives us an hour or so of prime time boredom and nothing more entertaining than plagiarism. We don’t even get coverage of the arcane business of creating a party platform, a process akin to sausage making. Of course, the platform will be largely ignored before being forgotten entirely.

Conventions do give us our first good look at the saddest conventioneer, the poor vice presidential nominee. Not that they ever appear sad. They are expected to be an official cheerleader for the top of the ticket and almost unfailingly fulfill that role.

How does a person desirous of living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, instead of just visiting, end up playing such a distant second fiddle?

Mike Pence is the latest victim, er ... choice. Should his ticket win in November, Vice President Pence will have but a single constitutional responsibility: In the unlikely event of a tie vote in the Senate, he gets to break the deadlock. That’s it.

The job, downplayed by most of us, does come with some real potential. That entire “heartbeat away from the presidency” cliché has been prophetic nine times in our history; that’s 20 percent of our presidencies that ended before a term’s natural conclusion.

Four presidents died in office from illness (Harrison, Taylor, Harding and FDR), and four were assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy). One, Richard Nixon, resigned. (Michigan’s Gerald Ford then became the only person to have ever served as vice president and president without having been elected to either.)

How does Pence, or anyone, end up with the job?

Clearly, the most important criterium is the ability to actually be president, something John McCain forgot when he made his selection. They can’t have a scandal in their past or a potential one in their future. They can’t have behaved like an idiot on social media. They can’t be on the wrong side of any litmus test issue.

Pence, a safe choice, survived the vetting process, no campaign-destroying skeletons having been found. But campaign braintrusts are always naively hopeful the vice presidential pick will do more than avoid catastrophe. They always talk about what the second choice will add to the ticket.

Pence was elected to Congress on the tea party wave and has remained in the group’s good favor. As governor of Indiana, he has gladly signed restrictive abortion legislation and the infamous religious freedom bill that allows store owners to discriminate against members of the LGBT community. Trump likely believed that would give him better credentials with social conservatives skeptical of his commitment to their cause.

Pence has been a recipient of the Koch money machine, and the brothers have thus far refused to help Trump. Maybe Pence helps open the Koch’s third-party independent super- PAC apparatus.

And Pence has a visceral dislike for all things Clinton, so Trump logically assumed he’d be a useful attack dog on the campaign trail.

The better question might be why did Pence, with presidential aspirations of his own, accept?

Maybe he was just happy to get out of Indiana, where his approval rating is now below 40 percent and still falling. Maybe he figured Trump will lose, and Pence, having soldiered on bravely during a losing campaign, can keep his White House hopes alive.

Unfortunately, only one losing vice presidential candidate in history eventually has won the presidency; FDR was on the losing ticket in 1920 before being elected president in 1932.

We have a difficult enough time just remembering losing vice presidential nominees.

Quick now, who was Al Gore’s VP in 2000? How about John Kerry’s in 2004? Or Mitt Romney’s in 2008? Exactly.

(Senator Joe Lieberman was Gore’s running mate. He lost his bid for re-election to the Senate. John Edwards ran with Kerry. His career ended with scandal and criminal charges. Congressman Paul Ryan, now Speaker of the House, ran with Romney.)

Perhaps Pence believes Trump will win and, in four or eight years, he will be the presumptive successor. But being the sitting vice president is also a poor launching pad for a presidential campaign; only four (John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren and Bush the Elder) have been elected president.

It’s not exactly a dead-end job but, sadly, the vice president’s best chance of promotion is that something terrible befalls the president. Come to think of it, Trump would be the oldest president ever.

Now it’s Hillary Clinton’s turn. And another vice presidential nominee will smile into the cameras despite the history. After all, Clinton also would be almost the oldest president ever.