The past few weeks have focused the nation’s attention on the importance of vice-presidential choices. We have Joe Biden as president because Barack Obama picked a two-time failed presidential contender out of the Senate. We have Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee entirely because Biden did the same for her after her 2020 campaign flamed out. Donald Trump narrowly avoided assassination, then selected J. D. Vance, a freshman senator who could never make a national ticket on his own. And now, Harris is auditioning potential running mates.
As our first vice president, John Adams, once complained, “my Country has in its Wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived: and as I can do neither good nor Evil, I must be born away by Others and meet the common Fate.” John Nance Garner, who left his job as speaker of the House to be Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president for eight years, more pungently complained that the job “isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.” But vice-presidential choices have often mattered quite a lot — and more than a few presidents and presidential candidates have screwed them up royally.
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