AND THE WINNER WAS…!

By Edwin Cooney

Unless you’re a history nerd like me, it’s possible, even likely, that you’ve worried more about your next dentist appointment or about your next colonoscopy than you have about the actions and personhood of Vice President Joe Biden during the past four years!  Even though some of his detractors regard him as something of a pain (guess where!), I’ve always liked the guy.

The general consensus seems to be that last week’s vice presidential showdown in Danville, Kentucky -- (of all places!) was contentious if not particularly enlightening.  This was the night for Joseph R. Biden to actually earn his six figure annual salary by bringing the president a clear political victory in this series of jousts we call political debates.  I say that because historically vice presidents have been more valuable as politicians than they’ve been as office holders or, if you prefer, as “public servants.”

Under the constitution, a sitting vice president has only one duty and that’s to preside over the United States Senate and to cast the deciding vote if that “world’s greatest deliberative body” vote is tied.  Any other duty a sitting vice president has is at the discretion or pleasure of the president.

It’s easy, and therefore tempting, to trivialize what vice presidents have and haven’t accomplished, since non-accomplishments vastly outnumber vice presidential accomplishments.  Still, at least from a theoretical standpoint, I find it both sobering and instructive when we do get a peek at how some past vice presidents have considered weighty national matters.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1850, the United States Senate was debating the admission of California into the union.  Three aging senators, Henry Clay of Kentucky, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, all of whom would be dead within two years, were debating California’s entrance into the union.  Clay and Webster, the two “great compromisers,” were working to cut a deal while Calhoun opposed outright California’s admission into the union.  President Zachary Taylor, a non politician and a slave holder, announced that he’d veto what came to be known as the California Compromise because it contained the infamous fugitive slave law provision.  Taylor believed that while the constitution protected slavery in the states, the federal government had no business getting involved in the recapture of “run away slaves.”  He made it clear that such a bill would not get past his desk.  Vice President Fillmore, on the other hand, who reportedly personally hated slavery, went to the “President’s Mansion” and told President Taylor that if the California Compromise was tied in the senate, he’d support it.  Exactly what Taylor told Vice President Fillmore, Mr. Fillmore never revealed.  However, President Taylor suddenly died after scarfing down too much contaminated cherry milk punch at the July 4^th, 1850 dedication of the Washington Monument.  Thus, the newly minted President Millard Fillmore, as promised, signed the California Compromise. Incidentally, he did so against the advice of his wife Abigail (Powers) Fillmore who had once been the president’s schoolteacher. And the crisis between the North and the South became even more of a moral crisis than a political dilemma.  Many believe that if civil war wasn’t inevitable before passage of the fugitive slave law as part of the Compromise of 1850, it became so once the former vice president signed that morally flawed bill.

According to Professor Robert A. Caro’s latest multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, the enmity some members of the Kennedy administration held toward LBJ was such that neither JFK nor RFK paid any heed to Vice President Johnson’s advice as to how to get any bill through the congress.  Hence, the martyred president’s gleaming civil rights record immediately after his assassination has not stood the test of time.  As I see it, one may well conclude that had JFK better utilized LBJ’s practical political knowledge, health care and tax cut legislation may have been passed to the nation’s benefit, and John F. Kennedy may have been a near great president rather than a mere above average president.  As it stands, Lyndon Baines Johnson, rather than John Fitzgerald Kennedy, is legitimately rated a near great president in the annals of presidential evaluation.

Historically, vice presidents have been most valuable to sitting presidents as “political hatchet men.”  Throughout the 1950s, President Eisenhower used Richard Nixon to get down and dirty with Democrats during the off year congressional elections of 1954 and 1958 while he hovered above the political playing field.

Having been useful to Ike as a political hatchet man, Richard Nixon subsequently used Vice President Spiro T. Agnew to pillory anti-Vietnam war critics until, as many believe, Agnew became sufficiently popular among conservative Republicans to be a possible threat to the president’s prerogatives if not to the president’s political security.  There are many who insist that Spiro Agnew was significant enough politically that, had Nixon protected him from prosecution for fraud and tax evasion, he might never have been forced to resign the presidency.

If Americans regard last Thursday’s nationally televised "Paul and Joe Show" as mere political chatter, than who won can hardly matter.  If neither man can gain political advantage for the head of their ticket, perhaps traditional vice presidential obscurity has a genuine national purpose!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY