Vice-Presidential

 

Now that the ex-President and apparently certain Republican candidate for the presidency in the upcoming general election has been adjudged guilty of felonious crimes, and now that the bad-boy son of the sitting President and all but certain Democrat candidate in that election is likewise a convicted felon, where precisely do we find ourselves as Americans?  Besides in an orgy of illogical equivalation, that is?  I would like to think that profound embarrassment might be the opening bid on this one, but don’t count on it.  What would embarrass your average Washington politician would shame a hog to death.  We are not quite a banana republic, as the doom-peddlers in the press suggest, but more like the intermediary stage of an “Only Fans” republic.

 

I am among the statistical majority of Americans who seem to be in a state beginning with disquiet and then rapidly revving up from there as we think about the impending election.  Leaving aside all strictly political questions, the age and affect of the presidential candidates is a matter of concern, an entirely legitimate one.  Take it from one who knows: eighty is not the new anything; it is old age.  This perception immediately leads to a focus on the major candidates for the vice-presidency, only one of whom is presently known.

 

There is a good deal of long-accepted hypocrisy concerning the choice of vice-presidential candidates by the political parties.  The standard rhetorical position is that the person chosen, who is at the remove of “one heartbeat” from the highest office, is always someone fully and manifestly qualified to be president.  Does anyone actually believe this pious malarkey?  Certainly not the national press, whose reporters and commentators stress such matters as the desirability of regional, factional, racial, or gender diversity.  Another implicit desideratum—loyalty to the boss—seems to be the primary if not sole requirement of the most recent and currently presumptive Republican candidates.  Mr. Biden offered early and unequivocal assurance that his vice-presidential pick would be a woman.  This prerequisite reduced the candidate pool by less than a half in absolute terms, but considerably more than half in the terms of tested, experienced politicians on the national scene.  Still, my own subjective and personal observation is that on the whole our prominent female politicians are proportionally more capable and promising than the male colleagues who so considerably outnumber them.  That is of course a personal judgment without objective verifiability.  Whether that judgment be just or not, the pool was soon to be drastically reduced when a racial codicil was added to the presidential candidate’s stated will.  Very shortly thereafter the following appeared in the national press.  “More than 100 prominent Black men released a strongly worded open letter Monday, warning Biden that not picking a Black woman would cost him the election. The signatories of the letter included rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, radio show host Lenard McKelvey (a.k.a. Charlamagne tha God), actor Cedric Kyles (a.k.a. Cedric the Entertainer), commentator Van Jones, Bishop William J. Barber and civil rights attorney Ben Crump, among others.”

 

The main point of this essay is not a selective criticism of personalities, but I see little evidence that Kamala Harris has been a successful vice president or would be a good president.  Since she so far has no Republican counterpart, comparisons are impossible.  One cannot be even handed while being empty handed.  That Mr. Trump’s eventual choice will strike me immediately as “presidential” seems unlikely, but we must wait to find out.  Getting back to the current known quantity, Vice President Harris, she is less well regarded in the polls than either of the prospective presidential candidates, both of whom are “under water” as the lingo goes.  So I am in the national majority.   Part of what I sense as the near despair of the electorate as it contemplates November is a group of “under water” candidates whose primary attractive quality is in the “lesser evil” category.  My own misgivings are less directed to policies I fear than to failures in that essential part of national leadership that is clarity, power, and conviction in the articulation of those policies.  This is not an English professor’s snobbery.  The ideas by which politicians live are seldom more coherent than the language in which they express them.  Nor do I set the bar unreasonably high.  I shall presume on faith that Ms. Harris commands the orthography of the word potato, which proved to be a shoal upon which Vice President Dan Quayle’s political boat foundered; but I have to say that in terms of public oratory Quayle was a virtual Demosthenes or a Danton when compared with her.  Even in the festival of inarticulateness that is the United States Senate (a.k.a., “the greatest deliberative body on earth”) the word salads she dishes up are particularly lacking in nourishment.  "The governor and I, we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right, the significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires. What we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.”

 

Well, like most elderly people I in fact do quite a bit of thinking about the passage of time and the significance thereof.  “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream  Dies at the opening day.”  Also daughters, of course, though Watts was a stickler for meter.  I try to be optimistic, but it’s often an uphill struggle.  Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614) began with a fanciful pessimistic etymology of the word world itself: it is supposed to mean “ware old, i.e., that thing that groweth worse as it groweth older.”  That is the opposite of progressivism—regressivism.  There is a lot of that around in the air today, but I do not share it.  America has been in a few tight corners in its time.  Those so confidently predicting the death of American democracy should one or the other of the two candidates win in November might remember this.  Are we really facing greater danger than in 1777, or 1858, or 1932?

 

The office of the Vice Presidency is peculiar in various aspects, one of them being that in choosing a candidate one person, (the presidential candidate) is the sole elector.  This means that one man elects our vice president.  According to a famous indelicacy of John Nance Garner, who in 1933 accepted the job from Franklin Roosevelt in exchange for a few convention votes, the job is “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”  One doubts that we actually have a reliable economic history of this particular commodity; so I won’t go there.  But I record my suspicion of rank exaggeration.   Whether this was a more pessimistic evaluation than that of Theodore Roosevelt is debatable.  Teddy said, "I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history, than vice president."  In fact fifteen vice presidents have moved on to the presidency, eight of them on account of the death of a president, and four of these were later elected to terms of their own.  I’d say that’s a pretty consequential launching pad.  The vice-presidency is certainly a job that would seem to deserve a “free and fair” election of its own as opposed to the opportunity for the popular ratification of the pick of a single man.