THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608090482
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRIS LAMB, SPECIAL TO THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
LENGTH: 110 lines
If you were under consideration to become Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole's running mate - and for a time, who wasn't? - you faced the prospect of becoming the country's next vice president. If that seems daunting to you, remember the words of John Adams, the country's first vice president: ``My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.''
Adams' stirring words are as true now as they were in his day. The country may have grown a lot in 200 years, but the job of the vice president hasn't: You break ties in the U.S. Senate, attend funerals of heads of state and wait for the president to die. The job looks good on a resume but that's about it.
``The vice presidency is for people who want to be something and not for people who want to do something,'' says Steve Tally, a science writer at Purdue University and author of Bland Ambition: From Adams to Quayle - The Cranks, Criminals, Tax Cheats, and Golfers Who Made it to Vice President.
It may be the best book ever written on the vice presidency. But this is to damn it with faint praise - like calling someone a good vice president.
What does it take to be vice president?
``Just because you're qualified to be president doesn't mean you're qualified to be vice president,'' Tally said, adding that the qualities desired in a president - leadership, vision and charisma - are not the qualities desired in a vice president.
You want a vice president who can be ``a hatchet man,'' Tally said, defending the president's honor whenever and however it is vilified. Secondly, ``you can't show up the president.'' And finally, Tally says, you must have enough ambition to want the job but not enough ambition to do anything if you get it. In short, you must have bland ambition.
This may be vice president Al Gore's problem, or, as Tally puts in political jargon, ``he may just be a lumphead.'' The insignificance of the office is not lost on Gore. When asked what it was like being No. 2 at the White House, the vice president responded: ``Hillary seems to enjoy it.''
Gore is at least more charismatic than Walter Mondale, the last Democratic vice president, Tally says. ``If Mondale had been any duller, he would have been capable of photosynthesis,'' he says.
An overlooked - though vital - part of being vice president is to serve as a straight man to the nation's comedy writers. And no vice president ever served his country more faithfully than Dan Quayle, president Bush's vice president. According to Bland Ambition, a Washington media watchdog group found that on the basis of the number of jokes told by late-night comedians, ``Dan Quayle was the most laughed-at person in the country.''
On the issues of the 1988 presidential election, Quayle said: ``This election is about who's going to be the next president of the United States.'' On life in the South Pacific, he said: ``You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are. . . . And as far as I'm concerned, happy campers you will always be.'' And on his verbal gaffes, he said: ``I stand by all my misstatements.'' If anything ever happened to Bush, one joke went, ``the Secret Service was under orders to shoot Quayle.''
Tally, a Republican from Indiana, expresses gratitude toward Quayle, another Republican from Indiana. For years, Tally couldn't find a publisher for his book. One publisher after another said there wasn't enough interest in the topic. But when Quayle came upon the political scene, Tally found himself with an embarrassment of riches. In the acknowledgments, he thanks Quayle. ``For without him, this book could never have been published.''
Fourteen of the country's 45 vice presidents have become presidents - eight after the death of a president; one after the resignation of a president; and five have been elected. In 1988, however, Bush became the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836.
After Ronald Reagan selected Bush to be his running mate, Bush changed his mind on so many issues to agree with Reagan that ``Doonesbury'' creator Gary Trudeau had him putting his manhood in a blind trust. When asked in the strip whether his manhood would be earning interest in the trust, Bush replied that there wasn't much there to collect interest on.
No vice president ever died of overconfidence. One, however, Rufus de Vane King, the 13th vice president, died of tuberculosis six weeks after being inaugurated. He was the nation's only bachelor vice president, but according to Tally, it also was widely rumored that he was a homosexual and his rumored lover was James Buchanan, the country's 15th president.
``He was certainly a fop and a sissy,'' Tally says about King, who wore silk scarves, glittery accouterments and a powdered wig long after it was fashionable. King's contemporaries called him ``Miss Nancy'' and ``Aunt Fancy.'' Asked if some readers might be upset to read that one of the country's vice president was a homosexual, Tally replied, ``I think they should be upset that they elected an alcoholic dying of a terminal disease.''
In 1916, James Schoolcraft Sherman received 3.5 million votes for vice president even though he had died a week before the election. This remains a record to this day for any dead vice presidential candidate. American voters have a history of electing vice presidents who were either dying, dead, or lost at sea, figuratively if not literally. Thomas Riley Marshall, the 18th vice president, said that once there were two brothers: ``One ran away to sea and the other became vice president, and neither of them was heard from again.''
If it weren't for dubious achievements, vice presidents probably wouldn't be known for anything. While Aaron Burr, the country's third vice president, was in office, he committed murder. Two vice presidents, Burr and John Breckinridge, were charged with treason. Two others, Schuyler Colfax and Spiro Agnew were accused of accepting bribes in office. Agnew, the country's 39th vice president, resigned from office in disgrace and would later plead no contest to charges of tax evasion.
It would be wrong to ignore the contributions of vice presidents to American society. For instance, at least two vice presidents are quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations for things they said while they were in office, Tally said. When referring to the National Negro College Fund's motto - ``A mind is a terrible thing to waste,'' Quayle said, ``What a waste it is to lose one's mind - or not to have a mind - how true that is.'' The other quote is from Marshall, and, according to Tally, it stands as the greatest single accomplishment of a vice president in history: ``What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.'' How true that is! MEMO: Chris Lamb is an assistant professor of journalism at Old Dominion
University.
KEYWORDS: REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION 1996 VICE
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