Vice Presidents, Part 2

Show Notes

Aughie and Nia discuss the office of Vice President of the United States. The second of two episodes explores interesting tidbits about various vice presidents, and ends with some quotes from office holders on the importance of the position.

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Announcer: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.

Nia: Hey Aughie.

Aughie: Morning Nia. How are you?

Nia: I'm good. How are you?

Aughie: Good. Quite excited listeners to record our follow-up episode about one of the seemingly less important positions in the US Federal Government, the office of vice president.

Nia: Hey, I'm going to suggest that it is not seeming when they wait to give you a house until 1978 which is where we left off. Was that they got a house, actually, they didn't go build a house. They had a house laying around on the naval grounds and they were like, hey, why don't we stick the vice presidents's residence over here? That will be nice because that will be easy for us to protect since we've already got a military perimeter on it. Talk about lazy. We don't even go find you your own residence. We just stick you where there's already a house and some guards and and so whatever, I know I sound better.

Aughie: In the previous episode about the office of vice president, we talked about how many of the position holders thought so very little about the position.

Nia: Yes, I believe the quote was that it was not worth a warm bucket of spit. But really we don't give him the house.

Aughie: What was his name? Vice President Marshall who was Woodrow Wilson's vice president. He went ahead and made the statement that he was not interested in working anymore but he would be willing to do the vice presidents's job again.

Nia: Wait a minute. We're going to get to some interesting quotes. But I want to ask you first about there have been some weird vice presidential happenings.

Aughie: Yes.

Nia: Like vice presidents who quit, can you tell us about some of those? Because I'm always intrigued by this more personal.

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: Because didn't we have a vice president sworn in not in the United States which seems weird.

Aughie: Yes.

Nia: That'd be really cool though. It's Slumdog Millionaire, we just pick the person and put them on hey, you want to be vice president?

Aughie: Well, hey, the interest in the position would probably go up if we do the hourly show to pick.

Nia: Big brother vice president version, or Jersey Shore vice president version.

Aughie: Or dancing with the future vice president.

Nia: That would be fantastic, I'm so in.

Aughie: Or we picked vice presidents on America's Got Talent.

Nia: They have to sing, they have to juggle.

Aughie: They have to dance.

Nia: But you know what in considering the amount of stuff they do which has to do with showing up and being ceremonial, what we really should do is run it like the Miss Universe pageant. We should have a swimsuit competition, we should have a talent competition.

Aughie: How well do you look at a funeral?

Nia: Exactly. How somber can you look? What somber remarks can you make? Instead of the question being, what would you like to solve in the world? World hunger, like that's the answer. What we should say is, what would your remarks be if a third world dictator died and you had to speak at their funeral and not reveal CIA involvement in their death? The person will be like, well, the first thing I would say is, like you know what I mean? I think that would be cool.

Aughie: Could you keep a straight face when you're staring at the casket of a former third world dictator that you're pretty much sure.

Nia: We killed.

Aughie: United States killed. Oh my goodness.

Nia: I'm just saying instead of a swimsuit competition there would be a suit competition. How well cut are your suits? Are they tailored nicely? That kind of thing. Or if you're a female you could do that with dresses appropriate or you could have a whole quiz about what's the appropriate color to wear to the appropriate event. Like you're opening a store in a city that's coming back with manufacturing, you're opening a manufacturing plant, what color should you wear? That thing. That'd be really cool. Actually that would be really useful.

Aughie: Well, how do you respond when the president send you to a country that nobody in the cabinet has ever heard of or an international.

Nia: Or confined on a map.

Aughie: For an international event that nobody in the United States cares about but the United States needs to have an official representative.

Aughie: You're opening the FIFA Cup between France and Brazil. In United States most people don't even know what the FIFA Cup is.

Aughie: But we need to make it even worse.

Nia: Or the Cricket Cup.

Aughie: Two countries who are participating in this global sporting event that nobody's ever heard of between Luxembourg.

Nia: And Palau which most people could not find on a map.

Aughie: How do you respond?. These are the hypothetical questions that get asked in either Miss Universe competitions or job interviews where they've already identified the candidate they want to hire but they're looking for reasons to reject the other interviewees. Here's a hypothetical, we hire you and you have to do x.

Nia: The other thing too is, instead of a talent competition, you would have who cuts ribbons the best? Who stands at attention the longest. Like you could have one of those things where people, instead of touching a car until they pass out they would just have to stand at a really long funeral or a really long parade, that thing. Yeah, you could.

Aughie: I have a concept on.

Nia: Honestly, can every state send someone.

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: So there cold be a.

Nia: Every state would have the potential of having a vice president.

Aughie: President, yeah. But Nia, back to your question, we actually had a president.

Nia: There is a serious topic here. That's alright.

Aughie: Who took the oath of office while he was in Cuba? That was William King. He was the "unlucky vice president number 13." He missed his inauguration in March of 1853 because he was recovering from TB, I always mispronounced the word.

Nia: Tuberculosis.

Aughie: Yes.

Nia: That's back when people went to Florida or Cuba or other places. That's before we knew Arizona existed.

Aughie: Yes. When he finally returned to the United States one month later, he died. He was only in office for basically a month. It's the shortest tenure of any vice president. One month.

Nia: You said inauguration March 4th. That's right. Inauguration used to be in March and then it got moved back to January where it is right now. If he died in April, yeah. Wow.

Aughie: He was only vice president for one month. We've had two quit.

Nia: I'm done. This job is too hard and I'm not doing it anymore. Or this job is so boring, I almost died from boredom.

Aughie: Well, actually neither of those two explanations. John Calhoun was the seventh vice president in our country's history. He was the VP to John Quincy Adams in the mid 1800s. But Calhoun quit because he wanted to fill a vacant Senate seat in his home state of South Carolina, which tells you how little he thought of the vice president job.

Nia: But in fairness to him, aren't there term limits on vice presidents, or are there?

Aughie: Back then there wasn't, because we didn't get the the amendment to the US Constitution to limit presidential and vice presidential terms to two until after FDR in the 20th century.

Nia: He could have conceivably been vice president a lot.

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: Because what I was thinking was, because now, if you have the choice between being vice president for a maximum of eight years or Senator for a maximum of 974,00 years, Strom Thurmond, I'm looking at you, then why would you not do Senate if what you want is to be a long-term public servant?

Aughie: For what I read for Calhoun, Calhoun's view of the vice presidency job was very similar to what you and I discussed in previous podcast episodes about how little lawyers fought of being a Supreme Court Justice early in our country's history, because we had people nominated to the Supreme Court who turned down the nomination. We had a Chief Justice, John Jay, who resigned from leading the court so he could run for governor of the state of New York.

Nia: Vice president was basically just seen as a guy waiting for the president to slip on a banana peel and die.

Aughie: Pretty much.

Nia: Nobody would want that job, because one, you're a little bit like a vulture. You're waiting around for somebody to die. But two, because the founders didn't give you anything to do. It be a tie-breaking vote. That's a lot of boredom. I can see why that would be annoying. Then the president makes you go do stupid stuff that you don't want to do.

Aughie: When you think about it, we discussed this in the previous podcast episode, Nia, many of these VP candidates were picked by presidential candidates after the VP candidate lost in the primaries to a particular person. Imagine what you have to swallow. To accept being on the ticket for the second slot after you just spent 2.5, 3 years trying to be the person in the top spot.

Nia: You just spent a whole lot of time telling everybody in the world why this guy would be a terrible person to have as president, and now you're saying, but no, I'll go work for you.

Aughie: The second VP, by the way, who quit.

Nia: But Calhoun, he was vice president for more than one president, wasn't he?

Aughie: Yes. Andrew Jackson, which is really shocking because those are presidents of two different political parties. Jackson and John Quincy Adams despised one another, despised each other.

Nia: That's interesting. Calhoun could play both sides of that or Calhoun came to despise Adams.

Aughie: Calhoun, at least initially in his national political career, was known as one of the leading statesmen in the United States, Him, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. It was only later after Calhoun became a senator from the state of South Carolina that he became known as an ardent advocate for States rights. It may be in some ways it wasn't all that surprising that Calhoun was able to be elected as vice president for two different presidents from two different political parties.

Nia: That's a pretty interesting talent. Sorry.

Aughie: We're identifying if you will, unusual phenomenon in the position of vice president. Calhoun resigned. The only other vice president to resign was Spiro Agnew, who was Richard Nixon's vice president. Agnew had to resign because he was charged with tax evasion and taking bribes in his previous government position, which was Governor of the fine State of Maryland.

Nia: He did that when he was governor. Not when he was vice president.

Aughie: He did it when he was governor.

Nia: Although, he probably did it when he was vice president too. Let's be honest, if you get away with it, well, anyway. Maybe I'm cynical never mind.

Aughie: We could hypothesize.

Nia: We could also hypothesize that he probably was all swirled up in the Watergate thing too.

Aughie: Well, interestingly enough, Nixon didn't know him personally when he was picked to be Nixon's VP candidate. The Republican Party establishment thought Nixon needed a mid-Atlantic East Coast VP because Nixon was known more as a West Coast Barry Goldwater ask Republican.

Nia: Because Nixon was from California, right?

Aughie: Correct.

Nia: Spiro Agnew resigns.

Aughie: Because of the 25th Amendment, Nixon picks Gerald Ford who was a member in the House of Representatives for Michigan. According to the 25th Amendment, both houses of Congress had to approve his choice, and they did so. The vote wasn't even close.

Nia: Really?

Aughie: Ford becomes vice-president and then all hell breaks loose about Watergate. When Nixon resigns as president, Gerald Ford becomes president. Gerald Ford is our only VP presidential occupant who never won a general election for either position.

Nia: Which in part is what hurt him when he ran for re-election.

Aughie: He had no political capital.

Nia: He also didn't know how to do it. That was a heck of a thing going from a representative for Michigan. You're only doing part of a state to a national campaign. That's a big thing. But there's another vice president who served under two presidents. There's a fork in the road for Mr. Calhoun because he's one of two exclusive clubs.

Aughie: Yes. George Clinton. George Clinton served as VP for both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. By the way, you want to talk about a vice president who had very little to do? Thomas Jefferson and James Madison didn't become president with very many doubts about what they wanted to do as president. You're talking about two of the leading figures of the American revolution, two founding fathers, if you will. They didn't really rely all that much on Vice President Clinton.

Nia: Just out of curiosity, did the vice president's office pay back in the day? Has it always been a pay?

Aughie: Yeah, it was a paid position so that's not one of the reasons why. I think I know where you're going with that, Nia. That's not one of the reasons why we got, how can I put it? A bunch of mediocre people as VP for most of the 19th century. Now, we already talked about how vice presidents have been dumped by their presidents.

Nia: Did we talk about that?

Aughie: Well, we mentioned how FDR went through three different vice presidents. Abraham Lincoln, in a very controversial decision, got rid of his first term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin.

Nia: What a great name.

Aughie: I love that name. You imagine the monogram on his cufflinks and on his shirts, double H.

Nia: He probably sounds cooler than he was.

Aughie: Hamlin wasn't actually picked by Lincoln. Remember, we talked about this on the podcast episode. Vice president selection throughout most of the 19th century, well into the 20th century, we even saw this with FDR. The party establishment would pick the VP as a patronage payoff or trying to go ahead and shore up what the party establishment thought might be a weak link.

Nia: You're from the North, you're rich, we need somebody from the South who maybe came up through more working class. That thing to balance the ticket. You got the Kennedy Johnson ticket for that reason. Young and brash and Northern and then older, more established Southern Texas.

Aughie: The thing with Lincoln was, by all accounts, he had been largely a failed politician before he got the Republican Party nomination in 1860. Hamlin, however, was considered a solid, electable official who could balance the ticket. Lincoln wins and then Lincoln decides when he runs for re-election, he's going to pick a Southerner, Andrew Johnson, to balance the ticket. Because Lincoln foreshadowed, if you will, the nation coming out of the Civil War. Nia, you've gone mute.

Nia: I'm sorry.

Aughie: That's all right.

Nia: That happens to us in the world of Zoom recordings. I was saying, that's very much a reflection of the Civil War. It's how can we return the South to the Union. I wonder if Hamlin was okay with that. I wonder sometimes what people are promised when the party comes to them and says, we're not going to use you the next time because we need to do something different. The way you're fired now, they're like, "We need to go in a different direction. We'd be happy to help you do whatever you need to do to move on," kind of thing. I wonder if the vice presidency is such a sucky job that the person goes, "Thanks. Appreciate that. I'm going back to Mane."

Aughie: From what I was able to gather Nia, in my research, most vice presidents who were removed for subsequent presidential terms, didn't really mind all that much because they were largely shut out of the work within the White House. We already talked about FDR. FDR thought so little of the vice president position. As we discussed in the previous podcast episode, FDR dies, Truman becomes president and only then does Truman find out that we have the atomic bomb.

Nia: Which is a thing you would think that somebody would tell a vice president. Like, "Hey, by the way, here's this world-altering thing we've been working on because we're afraid the Nazis are building one." That's really why we built one. We built one because we were afraid the Nazis were building one. Turns out the Nazis didn't have the technology and were not building one.

Aughie: No. But then as the war continued on and Japan was seemingly unwilling to surrender, then the bomb had a different purpose. Imagine you become president in the conditions that Truman became and now he's got to probably deal with one of the most difficult ethical decisions of the 20th century. Do I use this bomb to end a war, knowing full well that the test of the atomic bomb similarly suggested that hundreds of thousands of civilians would die?

Nia: He couldn't have known what a difference it would make to the political structure of the world, when someone had the ability to destroy entire cities with one bomb. By destroy, we mean completely, utterly destroy. Remove from human life.

Nia: Last time we talked we had mentioned that we were going to try to put intelligence briefings, we were going to try to link to some. No. You can't do that. Because apparently they're not made public, so I couldn't find any. I could find sample ones where they tell you the things they tell the president, but I couldn't actually find one even an old one. I'm assuming that that's all eyes only until, I don't know,200 years from now or whatever.

Aughie: Listeners, what Nia is referencing is in the previous podcast episode we talked about how if presidents exclude vice presidents then if the vice president ends up becoming president they're perhaps unprepared to do the job. It wasn't until well into the late 20th century that vice presidents received their own daily intelligence briefing and that wouldn't it be nice if we could go ahead and post on our resource guide.

Nia: I'm sure I'm on a list somewhere because I was searching that, I want the podcast to know I took one for the team. I'm assuming there are some out there probably that are rogue, I don't want to put anything like that on a link.

Aughie: Well, I mean, and they're classified for a reason.

Nia: Right.

Aughie: We've talked about this Nia in previous podcast episodes. On one hand democracies are founded on the idea of transparency.

Nia: Right.

Aughie: What was the basis of government decisions that affect a whole bunch of people's lives? On the other hand, some of that material has to be kept secret because if it became public then the nation's enemies would know one, what we know about what they're doing, but two, it would expose potentially how we gathered the information.

Nia: Human intelligence. We would be putting people in danger.

Aughie: That's right. Our human intelligence assets would be put into danger.

Nia: What I was hoping for was one that was really benign and didn't have a lot of information, but turns out they don't bother with those. Wherever is going to the president or vice president is written in such a way that people will have to be protected. I'm sorry listeners if you were looking forward to me being able to put a link in there but I could not.

Aughie: Nia, to that point, before we get back to the office of vice president. One of the things that I've found in doing research about, for instance, last year we looked at presidential leadership styles. Listeners, some of you may be aware that as presidents conclude their terms staffers will sometimes write books or do press interviews that suggest that some of our presidents have been, shall we say, not all that attentive or not seemingly intelligent enough to understand the nuances of the daily intelligence reports and briefings. Those staffers who go public are generally criticized by those who have worked, even some of our less than highly ranked presidents. Because that's not the thing that you do if you are a staffer who interacts with the president.

Nia: Right.

Aughie: Because the basic assumption is we're here to serve the office of president no matter who the occupant is. If you are that personal and petty that you want to besmudge the person that you worked with, then perhaps our vetting system should have rejected you as somebody who would interact with the most powerful person in the United States at minimum, and according to many scholars the most powerful person in the world.

Nia: It's just petty and small. That's the other thing. There are so many things that you can criticize people for, their reading skills of military briefs should not be one of them.

Aughie: If somebody who's never read a military brief, I don't know if they're well-written. I don't know if they're boring, exciting, technologically or technically challenging. Are they written in a Department of Defense language or speak that would challenge people with the highest of IQs, Mensa members? I don't know any of this. It's like the criticism I hear from my students when they have to read Supreme Court opinions, man, is this stuff difficult to understand or boring? I'm like, yeah, okay. Because they're writing it for a particular audience.

Nia: The key there is to slow down. That's usually the key to reading complicated things is just slow down, go over it again. But getting back to vice president.

Aughie: Can we talk about a jinx?

Nia: You know I love a jinx.

Aughie: I know you do, and I put this in our prep notes just for you.

Nia: Thank you.

Aughie: Okay. For the Office of vice president, there is a jinx. It's known as the Van Buren jinx. Martin Van Buren was a Vice President for Andrew Jackson, so he replaced Calhoun. Martin Van Buren became the first of only two vice presidents who have gone on to serve as president, elected. Gerald Ford would be the third.

Nia: Wait. Is that true? Wait a minute, I'm thinking.

Nia: No, Biden.

Aughie: Biden became the fourth; the third that was elected. Only four.

Nia: In the entire history of the country. That's crazy.

Aughie: Van Buren, Gerald Ford. But remember, Ford was never elected, so the Van Buren jink says a former Vice-President that goes on to win the election to become president. Van Buren was the first, then Bush 41.

Nia: That's a huge gap.

Aughie: Then Joe Biden.

Nia: That's 100 and some years.

Aughie: About 150 years. Yes.

Nia: But it's not because of lack of trying?

Aughie: Oh, no. A number of them tried.

Nia: Van Buren, did he curse the office in some way? Did he do one of those, I wave a rubber chicken over this and ruin it for everybody?

Aughie: Scholars are all over the map as to why. But let's face it again, most vice presidents were not picked for their potential to necessarily become president.

Nia: I guess, wow, I did not realize that that went on that long.

Aughie: We had some close calls. You actually mentioned one as you were running through the roll of decks in your brain, but you mentioned Al Gore.

Nia: In 2000 if he had won, he would have also been in that rather elite group of people.

Aughie: Interestingly enough, we've had more vice presidents win Nobel Peace Prize than we had them go on to become president.

Nia: One would think that Nobel would be more singular, but I guess not. Before we leave Van Buren, am I correct that Van Buren is one of those presidents in somewhere between 1800 and 1900? Did I get them all confused because they're all the same to me, except Lincoln?

Aughie: Yeah, pretty much. Most presidential scholars don't rank Martin Van Buren all that high. As I tell my intro to US government class, the period between Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th century is frequently referred to as the office of president in the wilderness.

Nia: Which President? Could you start naming names hoping that you're getting in the neighborhood of which one?

Aughie: They are largely indistinguishable.

Nia: It's terrible. We shouldn't feel this way, but we do.

Aughie: But again in many ways, the 19th century reflects the framer's intent about the US federal government because the dominant branch of the federal government in the 19th century was Congress.

Nia: Which is the people's branch.

Aughie: I mean, if you think about it, if you remove Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, most of the presidents of the 19th century were reactive to the Congress.

Nia: Fall into the mumble name, mumble category.

Aughie: Sure. Okay.

Nia: Would you say that the 21st century was the century of the supreme court?

Aughie: Well, political scientists can have pitched battles depending on what institution you study. If we brought our colleague Bill Newman back, Bill and I would probably go back and forth; me claiming the United States Supreme Court, him saying the office of president. But for most scholars, the modern presidency starting with Theodore Roosevelt, the office of president became the dominant branch of the federal government. You could even make the argument, the Supreme Court should never be in that conversation. That is, if the court is playing that much of a role in American society there are a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of institutions who aren't getting along with one another.

Nia: Which is what we're seeing now. Wait, let's go back to the Nobel Prize winners. Who are Nobel Prize winners?

Aughie: Let me see. We got Teddy Roosevelt. He was given the 1906 Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russian-Japanese war. Al Gore for his efforts to raise awareness about climate change. Calvin Coolidge's Vice-President, Charles Dawes, because he was the one who came up with the reparation payment plan for Germany following World War I. By the way, that was the reparation plan that Germany so disliked.

Nia: Which led to World War II.

Aughie: It led to the rise of the Nazis.

Nia: Hitler, Congratulations Charles Dawes.

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: That probably didn't work out the way anybody thought it was going to. We're three for three; three have gone on to be president and three have won Nobel prizes.

Aughie: There you go, yes.

Nia: The vice presidents. There have been some really notable, how do I put this, impactful vice-presidents. Even though you and I have spent the last one and three-quarters episodes talking about how pretty much useless the Vice President's office is, it hasn't always been. There have been a few shining stars.

Aughie: There are both positive and negative. We mentioned Andrew Johnson just a few moments ago. Andrew Johnson became president after Lincoln was assassinated. But Andrew Johnson was in so many conflicts with the United States Congress post-civil war that he ended up being impeached. We've had other vice presidential candidates who were the first. Many Americans probably have never heard of James W. Ford. He was the first African-American to campaign for Vice President and received popular votes. He was the Communist Party VP nominee three times; 1932, 1936, and 1940.

Nia: Before the Red Scare?

Aughie: Yes.

Nia: Then you could run as a communist and not be brought before the House of un-American Activities.

Aughie: Activities, yes.

Nia: I didn't realize that we'd already had an African-American run for vice president. That's cool.

Aughie: We actually received popular votes. When Joe Biden nominated Kamala Harris, the press was saying she was a first person of color nominated for Vice President.

Nia: The side professor in you was like, no. Although she's the first black female.

Aughie: Female, yes. We've talked about Richard Nixon a number of times, but Nixon's vice presidency was not worthy for a number of reasons. In part, it was probably the first unpleasant Vice President-President relationship that the media reported on. Eisenhower's disdain for Nixon was so acute that Ike was quite willing to entertain questions about how little he thought of Richard Nixon while they were in office.

Nia: Oh, I see. Before that, The press might have known that there was a problem with FDR and his many vice presidents, but they didn't talk about it. They didn't.

Aughie: Report it.

Nia: Like they didn't report on Kennedy's extramarital relationship or FDR's extramarital relationships.

Aughie: That's right.

Nia: They didn't report on a lot of stuff, but in this particular instance, I guess it was just what? So openly known that they thought, "Well, it's fine. We can report it."

Aughie: Nixon was so obviously trying to position himself to be the next president. The former military officer in Eisenhower really disliked that. Because in the military, that's not the way you go about trying to get your boss's job.

Nia: You don't undermine your boss.

Aughie: Yes.

Nia: Which wasn't Nixon that was one of his things was that he was, what they call him Tricky Dick?

Aughie: Tricky Dick. Yes.

Nia: Because he did a lot of gaming.

Aughie: He was noted for his negative campaign activities.

Nia: But also the I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine stuff that goes on. He played a lot those games too, didn't he?

Aughie: Yeah. Many Americans may not remember another very prominent vice presidential candidate, Thomas Eagleton. Thomas Eagleton was Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern's pick for VP in the 1972 presidential election. The press found out that Eagleton, when he was a much younger person, had been hospitalized for depression and had received electroshock therapy.

Nia: Which was what they did for depression back in the day.

Aughie: That's right. Again, by today's standards, somebody having a history of depression would not necessarily be viewed, I would argue, as a negative to run for elected office. According to the statistics, there is a very significant percentage of the American population that have been diagnosed at various times in their life as suffering from depression, but back then, it was unusual. What was even more unusual was Eagleton did not deny it. He just came out and said, "This was the treatment my doctors recommended, I went through it, I've been fine since." Unfortunately, the press kept on asking the presidential nominee, George McGovern about it, over and over again.

Nia: It was getting in the way of the political messages.

Aughie: Yes. McGovern, I think, it was like 17 or 18 days later after initially saying he supported Eagleton, what was the quote? A thousand percent, but 17 or 18 days later, McGovern then forced Eagleton to withdraw as his vice presidential candidate.

Nia: Then McGovern went on to lose enormously.

Aughie: In one of the biggest landslides. I think he lost 49 out of 50 states.

Nia: Isn't there some argument that people didn't like that he turned on Eagleton, that they felt like, if you really back him 1,000 percent, then you've got to keep going all the way.

Aughie: A number of post-election polls identified a percentage of Democratic voters who didn't vote at all. They didn't vote for Nixon, they just didn't vote because of what McGovern did.

Nia: It hurt him in the long run. He should have stayed with Eagleton.

Aughie: Now, in hindsight, McGovern probably had next to no chance of beating Nixon in '72.

Nia: Nixon's machine by that point was, but it still would've been the right thing to do. If you really believe that the person is competent to serve, then.

Aughie: Is qualified to serve and do a good job as your replacement if anything untoward happened to you, then you stick with them. That type of disloyalty doesn't resonate typically with voters.

Nia: Right. It's one of the things that hurt Al Gore. Is that he was not loyal to Ken.

Aughie: Because there were a number of Democratic voters who were like, "Why are you running away from a successful two-term president's record that you claim,"

Nia: To have been a part of.

Aughie: Yes. "That you had a substantial part of." But the Gore campaign had done a bunch of polling that indicated that independent voters had issues with Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, his extra-marital affairs. At that time, Al Gore, he was married to, his wife's name was Tipper Gore. They had the classic Hollywood marriage. I think they had two kids. She was this attractive, intelligent spouse, and Al Gore wanted to portray a different image. The problem was there were a whole bunch of voters in the United States, particularly independent voters, who were able to disassociate Bill Clinton, the cad, with Bill Clinton, the effective President. Al Gore didn't understand that.

Nia: Didn't trust them. He should have trusted them.

Aughie: "When we stopped trusting voters, voters stop trusting us." This is a cautionary tale, and I've always thought that about politicians. Why refuse to acknowledge bad news? I could be wrong, but for instance, right now as we're recording this podcast episode, the United States government just announced that inflation is at the highest rate in 40 years. One of the things that I would say to the Biden administration is, don't deny that inflation is bad.

Nia: Right.

Aughie: Don't say it's transitionary or transitory. Come out and say, it's bad. We know it's bad and we're going to try to figure out how to address it.

Nia: We're working on it but we acknowledge it as a problem.

Aughie: Because right now I think a lot of American voters, a lot of people that I interact with who may be Biden supporters, who may not be. But the bottom line is, they know every month they have less money because the things that they have to buy cost more.

Nia: They're not done.

Aughie: They may not necessarily know all of the economic equations that some Harvard Law professor in economics has written papers about. But they know that at the end of the month, they have less money in their checking account. They have less money in their bank account. Don't run away from it, trust us. Come out and say to us, we know inflation is bad. We thought it was only going to be for three or four months, it's lasted longer. But we're going to put the collective power of the federal government behind addressing this. I don't understand people who don't trust the public. Yes, I made cracks about the collective intelligence of some of our fellow citizens. That's part of me being sarcastic, that's me being cynical. But at the end of the day, if you don't trust the voters, if you don't trust the public, then you don't give them any reason to trust you. Sorry for the rant, I apologize. I do want to mention one more noteworthy Vice-Presidential candidate.

Nia: Okay.

Aughie: This was, I think, important for both you and me and our lives because it occurred in 1984. That was Geraldine Ferraro and Walter Mondale, who was the Democratic Party nominee for president. Walter Mondale picked our first female vice presidential candidate from one of the two major political parties. That was noteworthy. We've had other women VP candidates on third party tickets, but I still remember to this day coming home from school and having my sister's wanting to talk about how there was a woman who was running for VP and she would be one step away from becoming president. I remember my sisters talking about it. It was huge in my family.

Nia: Well, I'm not trying to be cynical about the runs of people who went for president, Shirley Chisholm comes to mind. But other women who have attempted to run, but they were not going to get the nominations from the parties, not back then. But she actually got the nomination from the parties. She got the go ahead. That was groundbreaking in the sense from a major party. I see what you're saying about the Communist Party and Libertarian and that sort of thing where other women had tried, but she was, and she paved the way for Sarah Palin, who came closer than Geraldine Ferraro did, right?

Aughie: Yes.

Nia: The election was much closer.

Aughie: In 2008.

Nia: Sarah Palin as a Republican candidate, ran with John McCain. She was chosen to be John McCain's vice presidential running mate, which is very exciting. They paved the way for Kamala Harris. When we talk about change with the government and we talk about incremental change, that's what happened. That's how you get incremental change. Geraldine Ferraro made a serious run for it. Did really well in the debates, she was taken seriously as a candidate so she opened the door for Sarah Palin who came through and did a pretty strong run. She was beloved by a huge amount of the Republican Party.

Aughie: Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin make mistakes on their campaign trail.

Nia: Of course.

Aughie: But you and I've talked about this before Nia. Sarah Palin motivated a part of the Republican Party base, that John McCain could not.

Nia: Right.

Aughie: Likewise, you can go ahead and call it strategic, you can go ahead and say it was political, but Joe Biden needed Kamala Harris in 2020. To motivate a part of the Democratic Party base, that once again, was so close to concluding. We're picking another old white male from the 1980s and 90s, really?

Aughie: Again, that's one of the purposes of who you pick as vice presidential running mate for presidential campaigns.

Nia: I wanted to talk briefly about the fact that most of the vice-presidential folk have been pretty well-educated. They're relatively intelligent people. These are not just your average idiot walking around. They're a relatively elite group of people and yet, they say things and do things that occasionally make them, I'm sorry.

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: But the person who's coming to mind is Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle on a regular basis said stuff and in part it was because he was a terrible public speaker. Why? He would say things, trying to say something else and the press would pounce on him in part because I think he looked like Robert Redford in the candidate, right?

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: He looked like a guy who chewed bubblegum and was Debbie or whatever. [OVERLAPPING]

Aughie: Well, I mean if [OVERLAPPING].

Nia: Even Dan Quayle, wasn't he a lawyer?

Aughie: He was a former lawyer. He was a former member of the House of Representatives.

Nia: He had done well in those jobs.

Aughie: He had done well in those jobs. In fact, he worked with Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democrat, in passing labor reform law in the 1980s. I remember studying in undergraduate political science classes at the University of Pittsburgh, right?

Nia: Right. You get to end up at NWACP and their catchphrase used to be, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste".

Aughie: That's right.

Nia: It was basically saying, "Young black people should go to college". It's really important [OVERLAPPING]

Aughie: What? Yes.

Nia: That we bring those folks up through the system so that they can be administrators, and lawyers, and doctors and everything else in a way that they had not been represented in college for 200 years before that. He was trying to get behind that.

Aughie: But instead, he said, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not have a mind, is being very wasteful". How true that is. He so badly mangled it.

Nia: That's what he's known for, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind."

Aughie: He did a campaign event at a school where they were doing a spelling competition and I think he misspelled what, potato?

Nia: Potatoe.

Aughie: Yes.

Nia: He put an 'e' at the end of potato. [OVERLAPPING]

Aughie: Yeah, at the end of the which again, as somebody who reads college student papers all the time.

Nia: All right.

Aughie: I see some spellings to where I'm like.

Nia: I wonder what that is.

Aughie: Yeah. I'm pretty sure they didn't run spellcheck and by the way, for our younger listeners, there wasn't spellcheck in the 1980s [OVERLAPPING]

Nia: Right.

Aughie: All the way 1990s. But nevertheless, he would say that stuff it was because he was young and he was boyish, lucky to mean, Bush 41st campaign made it very clear that one of the reasons why they picked Dan Quayle was that he was young. That he would motivate younger voters to look at the Republican Party. But he had such difficulty with the English language in terms of public speaking.

Nia: Then the next run after him, Al Gore, was the stiffest human being to ever run [OVERLAPPING]

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: For an office when he was running into vice-presidential position. He's a policy wonk and he did not come across as warm and fuzzy. When Bill Clinton would say, "I feel your pain," people believed it. They believed that he had had the human experience. Al Gore just couldn't. In the end, it didn't cost him the vice but he was able to be vice president. But I remember going to a rally of theirs and him trying to joke about the Secret Service calling him plank, as his secret service name, because they all have secret service names. All the candidates and all the White House people were given secret service names. He tried to tell a joke about him. He was so stiff that they called him plank. No one in the room laughed [OVERLAPPING]

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: Because of the way he delivered it. People weren't sure if he was joking or not.[OVERLAPPING] I'm like, oh, no.

Aughie: When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, I remember after one of his debates against Bush 43, there was a review of the debate. This was a reporter who was generally in favor of Democrats. But said, Al Gore, reminds me of the smartest kid in the room. He is so earnest and as always raising his hand that after a while, every other student in the classroom just wants him to stop talking.

Nia: Right. Just shut up.

Aughie: Because we all know you're the smartest kid. Could you give the rest of us a chance?

Nia: Or stop breaking the curve, one way or another. [OVERLAPPING] Dude let it go.

Aughie: By the way, some of the other quotes about the vice-president position, either by vice-presidents or by people who were being considered for vice president or just hilarious. Again, I'm going to go back to Thomas Marshall, who was the VP for Wilson. "Once there were two brothers, one ran away to the sea, the other was elected vice-president, and nothing was ever heard from either of them again".

Nia: I like the one you have in here from Daniel Webster. "I do not propose to be buried until I am dead". That's when he turned down [OVERLAPPING]

Aughie: Being the vice president in 1839.[OVERLAPPING]

Nia: Being the vice president. "I do not propose to be buried until I am dead," like dang.

Aughie: Nelson Rockefeller, who is the VP for four, what do you do as vice-president? "I go to funerals, I go to earthquakes".

Nia: John McCain has one in there that's really good too. "I spent several years in the North Vietnamese prison camp in the dark. Fed with scraps. Do you think I wanted to do that all over again as vice president of the United States?" Like, wow.

Aughie: By the way, that's a quote that McCain uttered after McCain lost the 2000 Republican Party nomination for president to the eventual winner, Bush 43. McCain was asked by reporters, would you consider being Bush's VP candidate? That's when McCain [OVERLAPPING]

Nia: Wow.

Aughie: Without pause, I mean, he didn't even think about it. He just went ahead and said, you know what? The reporters were just like, I am.[OVERLAPPING]

Nia: Because what he doesn't mention here in the dark federal scraps and tortured.[OVERLAPPING]

Aughie: Yeah.

Nia: He was tortured at the Hanoi Hilton to the point where he could lift his arms over his head and he doesn't want to do that all over again as big vice president. But I think the best one and I would like if you would read, is the one from Austin Pressman.

Aughie: Yeah. What is the vice presidency? "The Constitution dictates only two duties. Casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. Apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us."

Nia: As long as you don't shoot someone, you have a successful vice presidency. I love that. [OVERLAPPING]

Aughie: On that humorous note, Nia [OVERLAPPING]

Nia: I don't think we can end up better than that.

Aughie: I think we can conclude our two-part discussion of the Office of the Vice President of the United States.

Nia: Thanks, Aughie.

Aughie: Thank you Nia.

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