Founding Fathers had better way to pick VPs

One of the worst tragedies of the administration of President Donald Trump is that his No. 2 man, Mike Pence, simply does what his boss tells him to do, no matter that some assignments are simply ludicrous. Take the commission on voter fraud that the vice president chairs. Trump believes that he lost the popular vote in the 2016 election because there was massive fraud. Nobody else believes this, but conspiratorial theories from the chief executive aren’t rebuked by his secondin-command because he, like all other recent veeps, holds his selection to the president in office.

The Founding Fathers had it right: The vice president wasn’t to be the president’s lapdog. Until the 12th Amendment (which required separate ballots for the two top posts) the vice president was the candidate who received the second-highest number of electoral votes behind the person who got the most and became president — a competing candidate for the top job, obviously at odds with the winning one. In other words, the Constitution drafters believed that many individuals — they didn’t foresee political parties — would run for president, and the second-best deserved the No. 2 spot.

Both political parties, now more than ever, cry for a political tradition abandoned in the 1930s — namely, the selection of a vice presidential nominee solely by the convention. Until the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the vice presidential selection was a convention decision, separate and distinct from what the head of the ticket may have wanted.

The reason for the tradition, even when the primary election system arose in the early 20th century, was common sense. Party delegates, removed from the personal foibles and prejudices of the head of the ticket, could speak better for the selection of the best nominee to (1) aid in the election process, (2) serve as both a supporter and critic of the president’s agenda and (3) be an effective chief executive in the event of the passing of the president. In other words, collective collaboration was better than one individual’s choice. And, the system worked well, from the time John Tyler took over the White House when President William Henry Harrison died shortly after his inauguration to Calvin Coolidge’s assumption of the top post on the death of Warren Harding.

Vice presidents were subject to rigorous evaluation every four years, and no sitting veep was renominated by a convention until 1916. And that was President Woodrow Wilson’s second, Thomas R. Marshall — also, like Pence, a former governor from Indiana — who was a disaster, never meeting the three expectations set forth above. Marshall, a court jester to Wilson, was best known for his saying: “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.”

In recent decades, the convention tradition has given way to a presidential nominee having the sole discretion for a vice presidential selection, on the grounds that the top leader somehow knows best whether the secondperson can work with the presumed chief executive and is presidential material.

More likely the vice presidential pick has been someone who won’t overshadow the president in abilities. How else can one explain the choice of Joe Biden by Barack Obama, Dan Quayle by George H. W. Bush or Sarah Palin by John McCain? Or a pit bull as in the instance of Dick Cheney under George W. Bush?

Worse, these examples illustrate state backgrounds that have almost zero relevance to needed electoral votes.

Here’s the bottom line: In the old days because of the convention’s selection process, vice presidents often differed in ideology from their presidents. The first second-person to be chosen for ideological agreement with the head of the ticket was George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania in 1844. When Tennessean James K. Polk, an expansionist in favor of annexing Texas, was nominated for president by Democrats, some party leaders hoped to balance the ticket with an anti-expansionist. But the delegates decided otherwise. Dallas was chosen, and in gratitude Texans annexed to the nation in 1845 named one of their cities for the vice president.

To be sure, contemporary political conventions are really without merit unless they assume some decision-making function. Their platform work is largely a farce — a show and tell forgotten by Inauguration Day. Their presidential candidates are known long before the confab takes place, their speeches have a oneday news cycle and all the marching in the aisles has all the depth and lasting effect of a child’s wellattended birthday party.

By independently picking a vice presidential nominee, conventions can serve, as they did in the past, the nation’s best interests.