The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In the fall campaign Biden dutifully took on the task of engaging the Republican opposition. After describing the GOP presidential nominee, John McCain, as “genuinely a friend” of his and a courageous war hero, Biden insisted, “You can’t change America and end the war in Iraq when you declare ‘no one has supported President Bush in Iraq more than I have,’ … when you know your first four years as president will look exactly like the last eight years of George Bush’s presidency.”25 And in a rap at Cheney while he was at it, Biden told the Democratic National Convention in Denver, “No longer will the eight most dreaded words in the English language be: ‘The vice president’s office is on the phone!’ ”26

  Biden’s potentially most dangerous event was his debate with McCain’s surprise running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, a charismatic and aggressive newcomer on the national stage. But he remained cordial toward her while demonstrating a clearly firmer grasp of the issues raised and focusing on McCain as a willing heir to the policies of George W. Bush, now sinking in the popularity polls. A postdebate poll by United Press International found Biden the clear winner, though Palin was credited with exceeding the low expectations set for her. When at a fund-raiser in Seattle Biden blurted that Obama probably would be tested in an early international crisis, Obama was reported later to have chewed out his running mate for the gaffe,27 but after the campaign Obama said of Biden’s performance in the primaries, “He could be a very disciplined candidate, so that was not a major concern to me.”28 On Election Day, the ticket of Obama and Biden prevailed with 52.9 percent of the popular vote and 345 in the electoral college compared with 45.7 percent of the popular ballots and 173 electoral votes for McCain and Palin.

  In the transition period, Biden said he intended to “restore the balance” in the vice presidency, seeming to suggest he would return it to its subordinate while still significant role in the executive branch, rather than the dominant role it appeared to have played under Cheney in the previous administration. Biden followed Cheney’s practice of staffing the vice president’s office with ranking specialists in foreign and diplomatic policy and economic affairs paralleling those on the president’s staff. But these specialists were to be integrated into the White House operation rather than forming the separate power center that had evolved under Cheney.

  Once sworn in, Biden embarked on a trip for Obama to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to make a personal assessment of the policy in place, and at home he undertook oversight of the implementation of the new president’s economic stimulus package, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He became the prime contact point for governors, mayors, and other local officials in tracking progress and problems around the country. Although Biden had signed on to be a general adviser, he agreed to chair the new Middle Class Task Force as close to his interests, dealing with child care, elderly care, college student assistance, and savings for retirement.

  In the first weeks of his administration, Obama also sent Biden to the annual European conference on security in Munich, where he reported the new president’s determination “to set a new tone not only in Washington but in America’s relations around the world,” to “work in a partnership wherever we can, and alone only when he must,” striving “to act preventively, not preemptively … starting with diplomacy.”29 Biden pledged to “press the reset button” with Russia to halt “a dangerous drift” in relations with that old enemy, while giving assurance to former members of the Soviet Union of U.S. recognition of their sovereignty.30 That summer he went to Ukraine and Georgia for the same purpose.

  As Obama considered requests from the American generals for more ground troops beyond the twenty-one thousand he had already agreed to send to Afghanistan, Biden reminded him of the original mission of rooting out al Qaeda terrorists. A compromise was struck for which Biden was said to have persuaded the president to proceed on a limited basis. Such advice was in keeping with his own role as a team player compared with Cheney in the previous administration, which he called “a divided government” between “Cheney and his own sort of separate national security agency and … the [official] National Security Agency.”31

  In late August, the NATO and U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, pushed Obama on the request for more ground troops, pointedly warning that unless more were sent in the next year, defeat of the insurgents might not be achievable. In response, over the next three months the president plunged into ten closed-door meetings with chief military, diplomatic, and political advisers at Camp David, with Biden at his side tenaciously arguing against what he saw as a drift from the counterterrorism mission that had justified the initial troop deployments. As a kibitzing Cheney accused Obama of “dithering” and inviting defeat, Biden dug in as the devil’s advocate against the demands of the generals.

  The result was a compromise in which McChrystal would get a surge of additional troops, but with a deadline of July 2011 to start their withdrawal. Biden argued that the strategy was what was important, not the number of troops added. In an Oval Office meeting in November, Obama polled the military chiefs, and they all signed on, committing to the timetable.32 Later, when Obama was asked what he thought of critics’ view that Biden had “lost” that debate, he said, “I don’t think anyone who was party to the very, very exhaustive discussions we had would say that. Joe was enormously helpful in guiding those discussions. The decision that ultimately emerged was a synthesis of some of the advice he gave me, along with the advice of the generals.”33 As the troop surge progressed amid continued criticism from Democratic liberals, Biden repeatedly insisted unequivocally that the timetable for starting to pull American combat troops from Afghanistan would hold and subsequently would be completed by 2014.

  In January 2014, former Obama secretary of defense Robert Gates, a Republican carryover from the George W. Bush administration, in a memoir accused Biden of “poisoning the well” against the military leaders supporting the surge. “All too early in the administration,” Gates wrote, “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials—including the vice president—became a problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.… I think he [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” A White House spokesperson swiftly defended the vice president, asserting, “From his leadership in the Balkans in the Senate, to his effort to end the war in Ira, Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time and has helped advance America’s leadership in the world. President Obama relies on his good counsel every day.”

  In the fall of 2010, Biden turned to the customary political role of vice presidents in working to maintain Democratic control of Congress in the midterm elections. But Republicans nevertheless won a majority in the House of Representatives with a surge of their own, from an emerging conservative Tea Party movement. The result was a stiffly obstructionist opposition party that flowered a bitter partisanship in Washington for the rest of Obama’s first term.

  Winding down his oversight of the American Recovery Act, in early 2011 Biden was assigned as the administration’s “legislative fireman” in debt-ceiling and deficit-reduction battles that dragged on through the next two years. With his decades-long experience on Capitol Hill, he led budget negotiations with new House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, paving the way for Obama’s direct intervention but ultimately falling short of a ballyhooed “grand bargain” with Boehner to swap tax cuts for new revenue. The result was an agreement on a “sequestration” of deep mandatory cuts in domestic and military spending if no other agreement could be reached by the end of 2012.34 It was not, providing only an unsatisfactory coda in the continued debate over deficit reduction.

  As the 2012 presidential campaign approached, Biden turned to the political wars, among some fanciful press speculations that he might be dropped from the Democratic ticket
in favor of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, despite her disavowal of interest and Obama’s reinforced support of his vice president. Biden precipitated one minor flap in May when on Meet the Press he volunteered that he had come to accept same-sex marriage, at a time when Obama was silent on the controversial matter. Cast by some as an embarrassment to the president, it actually served to smoke him out on an issue of increasing strength and significance to party liberals, who were growing restive about the cautious and pragmatic leader of their party. Of that occasion Biden said later, “There’s never been a time when I’ve said anything substantively … that I don’t think or know he’s already there. I knew where he was, but a lot of people said, ‘Well, maybe I should have let him say “I’m coming with gay marriage,” ’ but for me it was a matter of basic civil rights.” The next morning, Biden recalled, Obama “came in laughing and said, ‘Well, you told me.… I knew you’d say what you think.’ ”35

  In the fall campaign, after Obama had stumbled badly with a flat performance in his first debate against the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, Biden was credited with recovering for the Democratic ticket with an aggressive debate confrontation with the GOP running mate, Paul Ryan. Biden said later that after it looked like he and the president “needed a bump,” he took on Romney for his disparagement of “47 percent of Americans” as people who are bribed by federal benefits and Ryan for dividing the populace into “takers and makers.”

  “I can speak with authenticity about the middle class,” Biden said, “and it was a very good setup between me and Romney, because it almost offended me with his disregard for the folks I grew up with.” The 47 percent remark, Biden said, “went to the heart of it, because I am that 47 percent, my family is that 47 percent, the things I value most are those people.… Even if they told me not to, I couldn’t have been quiet [on] the 47 percent. That was the fundamental divide.”36 In claiming the mantle of champion of the middle class, Biden boosted the Democratic spirit. Obama then recovered in two subsequent debates with Romney, resulting in reelection of the Obama-Biden team.

  As their first term came to an end, jolted just before Christmas with the horrible mass murder of twenty first-grade children and six adults in a Newtown, Connecticut, schoolroom, Obama chose Biden to lead a national response for stronger gun controls demanded by an outraged and grieving American public. Despite a broad and energetic campaign, the effort fell short in the opening months of the second term, but Biden vowed to continue pursuing his goals.

  In all this, Biden could claim, however, that he had delivered on his pledge to “restore the balance” in a more limited but still influential role in the office compared with that of his immediate predecessor, Dick Cheney. Biden, seventy years old at the time but physically fit, did or said nothing to discourage speculation that he might make a third try for the presidency in 2016. His service alone in his first vice presidential term seemed worthy of such speculation. But with a continued expectation that Hillary Clinton might make a second bid for the Oval Office, it seemed more likely that Joe Biden would conclude his lengthy political career one step short of that long-held ambition.

  Biden, in noting that Cheney had freed himself of the same speculation in taking himself out of consideration as a future presidential candidate, mused at the time that such talk continued about himself. “I haven’t taken it out of the possibility, it’s not where I am,” he said, “but the good news for me from my perspective is that everything that would make me a viable candidate also is the very thing that would make me a good vice president. As long as I’m seen, and as long as I do a good job here, which I hope I did the first four years, of taking on important projects, executing them well, being a part of a team that makes this a successful administration, that’s the stuff that will make me viable, and so I don’t have to make that decision now, and I haven’t, for real.… That’s a familial decision that you don’t get to make alone. I also don’t want to get into a position where everything I did was viewed through the prism of I’m running for the nomination, because I think that diminishes the degree to which I can be helpful to the president.”37

  In any event, Joe Biden’s wide-ranging vice presidency had already provided in its own right a model for future occupants of the office and for the open collegiality and compatibility between Obama and Biden, which became a positive element in the administration’s governance of the nation.

  THE EVOLVING

  ASSISTANT PRESIDENCY

  When the founding fathers conceived the office of the vice presidency, for all the cavalier manner of its conception as a by-product of the electoral college, they anticipated it might produce the second most-qualified citizen to lead the country. The Constitution having stipulated that the vice presidency would go to the runner-up in the presidential balloting, the choices in the first two elections honored that expectation. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were high among the revolutionary era figures in the esteem of their contemporaries, and on balance their subsequent presidencies were judged favorably by history.

  But there was little evidence that the founders had given serious thought to the prospect that the vice president thus elected might actually become president. The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, provided for separate elections of the two officers in order to avoid the selection of candidates of rival political factions, as Federalist Adams and Anti-Federalist Jefferson were in their joint election of 1796. A presidential vacancy then would have meant a sharp change in factional control of the nation.

  The next five vice presidents—Aaron Burr, George Clinton, Elbridge Gerry, Daniel Tompkins, and John C. Calhoun—for one reason or another were found wanting as presidential material or otherwise tarnished their service by personal shortcomings or misbehavior. None was the particular choice of the president under whom he served, or was chosen by him at all, or was a significant partner in his administration. Nor was the second office much of a stepping-stone to the presidency for years after Adams and Jefferson. After Clinton and Calhoun, the only two vice presidents to serve under two different presidents, none other was renominated for a second term by a party caucus or convention for seventy-six years, until 1890, when James S. Sherman was elected to serve under William H. Taft. And none was reelected until Thomas A. Marshall in 1916, to continue serving under Woodrow Wilson.

  It was not until selection of the eighth vice president, Martin Van Buren, in 1832 that a president, Andrew Jackson, decisively chose the man he wanted and then made him a key political and policy adviser. Van Buren earlier was Jackson’s presidential campaign manager and then his secretary of state in the first term. When Calhoun resigned as Jackson’s first vice president, Van Buren become his vice president for his second term. In 1836, Richard Johnson, the ninth vice president, was selected by the U.S. Senate to serve under President Van Buren after failing to win a majority in the electoral college. Little in Johnson’s background suggested he was of presidential caliber, and he eventually spent much of his time as the vice president back in Kentucky, running a hotel and saloon.

  In 1864, in one of the most significant early cases of a president handpicking his running mate, Abraham Lincoln shunted aside his first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, a strong critic of slavery, in favor of Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat, to run with him for his second term. Lincoln determined that he needed a Union fusion ticket to win reelection and gain time to end the Civil War. It was a fateful decision in terms of how the South was treated in the Reconstruction policies that followed.

  In subsequent years, presidential nominees usually left the selection of their running mates to political party advisers who ran their campaigns. Senator Marcus Hanna, the Ohio kingmaker who masterminded William McKinley’s election in 1896, chose a successful businessman, Augustus Hobart, to be the twenty-fourth vice president. Hobart served as McKinley’s personal financial adviser as well as his virtual assistant president. But in 1900, after Hobart’s death, Hanna strenuously objected to pressure from
the New York Republican boss Thomas Platt that led to the nomination of Governor Theodore Roosevelt as McKinley’s second-term running mate and as the twenty-fifth vice president. After the election, Hanna memorably told the president, “Now it is up to you to live.”1

  In 1932, basic calculations and arrangements handled by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s political advisers lured House Speaker John Nance Garner to be his running mate and the thirty-second vice president during two FDR terms. But in 1940, for the third term, Roosevelt insisted on Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace as his standby, threatening not to run himself if the Democratic convention did not accept his choice. And in the aging Roosevelt’s fourth campaign in 1944, key political advisers sold him on the fateful selection of Harry Truman as the thirty-fourth vice president.

  In 1952, the political neophyte Dwight D. Eisenhower was unaware that choosing a running mate was in his hands as the Republican presidential nominee. He left the selection to New York political advisers Thomas E. Dewey and Herbert Brownell, who orchestrated the nomination of Richard Nixon to be the thirty-sixth vice president. Thereafter, however, presidential nominees increasingly chose their running mates themselves, though usually with seasoned political advisers at their elbows.

  In 1960 amid much internal opposition, John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon B. Johnson to strengthen his chances in the South. In 1964, LBJ tapped Hubert Humphrey after much false histrionics. In 1968, Richard Nixon went through a charade of consulting party leaders but then surprised them by picking Spiro Agnew as his running mate. The choice eventually raised questions about leaving the selection in the hands of a single person.