WASHINGTON — Since the beginning, there has been confusion over the vice presidency.
The framers of the Constitution didn’t know what to do with the backup executive, conjured late in the summer of 1787 as the Constitutional Convention was winding down. He had no power at all, initially. He was just a seat-warmer, ready to step forward if the president were impeached or keeled over. Eventually, the framers gave him busywork: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote” — you can see them winging it here — “unless they be equally divided.”
So began the long and twisted saga of what John Adams called “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” His successor as vice president, Thomas Jefferson, had little interest in the job and went home to Monticello.
“Over most of America’s history, the vice president has been stand-by equipment,” says Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s VP.
All that has changed, however. Mondale played a key role in upping the vice president’s profile.
Today, the incumbent vice president is widely regarded as the most powerful in history, a potent force, unfettered, almost a rogue operative. The job remains sufficiently enigmatic that Dick Cheney recently contended from his White House sanctum that he was not, in fact, a member of the executive branch. And there is an active academic debate over whether the Constitution bars someone like Bill Clinton — now ineligible for the presidency — from being elected vice president.
“It’s a bizarre office. It’s quite strange,” says Rick Shenkman, a historian at George Mason University in Virginia and author of “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.”
In recent days, we have seen again how the vice presidency enlivens our politics. The pundit class obsessed over Sen. Barack Obama’s search for a running mate and pondered whether he should pick his archrival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. He played it safe, going with veteran Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. That rather ho-hum choice found its reciprocal number a week later, when Sen. John McCain picked as his partner Sarah Palin, the feisty governor and “hockey mom” from Alaska.
It seems the vice presidency has always inspired a certain level of drama and nonlinear politics. The institution has an innate aversion to predictability. Perhaps this is how the framers wanted it all along: one job in government that would always keep things interesting.
Mondale may be best known as a failed presidential candidate (wiped out by Ronald Reagan in 1984), but among historians, he’s known as a game-changing vice president.
Mondale wrote a famous memo (famous, at least, in the academic micro-niche of vice-presidential studies) to Carter outlining an expanded role for the vice president as a counselor with access to all the top national-security meetings. He wouldn’t have any line authority and wouldn’t be put in charge of feel-good commissions like past vice presidents. He’d be more of a deputy president.
Carter agreed, giving Mondale a plum spot in the West Wing, an upgrade from the Old Executive Office Building.
But Mondale doesn’t like how the office has evolved under Cheney.
“The Cheney presidency — vice presidency — has really gone off the tracks,” Mondale says. “It became an office of secret, unaccountable, extra-legal exercise of power. None of us ever thought it would be abused in this way.”
“It’s a fascinating office to study because it’s an office that, for all of our history, has been a national laughingstock,” says Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University who has devoted his career to studying vice presidents. “Now, for the first time in our history, people are using the phrase ‘imperial vice presidency,’ which would have been an unimaginable oxymoron.”
