Some history on vice presidents

It’s possible you failed to notice, but the Republican convention has a theme for each night. The list sounds a little like a Lord of the Rings theme park: Land of Promise, Land of Opportunity, Land of Heroes and Land of Greatness.

You know Donald Trump’s big day was going to be Land of Greatness, right? Well, obviously. But do you think even the president felt a little wave of irony when he gave Mike Pence responsibility for Land of Heroes?

Lots of ways you could celebrate Pence’s renomination. Male fans might consider following his lead and go to events where alcohol is served only when they’re accompanied by their wives.

The vice presidency has had its ups and downs. We started out very well indeed with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Then, whoops, Aaron Burr. You may remember him as the guy who shot Alexander Hamilton. The only thing we can say about comparing Burr and Pence is that our current vice president is very unlikely to ever be featured as a lead character in a Broadway musical.

People have generally paid attention to the vice presidential nomination only when they’re waiting to see who’ll get it. But now that Kamala Harris is such a sensation, maybe the office will have more glamour.

Pence is very, very conservative on social issues — or at least as conservative as it’s possible to be when your running mate is a well-known former womanizer who conducted his adulterous affair with one future wife on the front pages of the New York tabloids.

In his current job Pence is pretty much tied up with the White House crises of the day, but it’s important to remember he’s very possibly a Republican presidential nominee for 2024 — if we have an election in 2024. One of the reasons he’s worth watching is trying to imagine what he’d do if the boss decided to ignore the election results this November.

Back in days of yore, nobody cared much about the vice presidency. John Nance Garner said it was “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Garner, who served for eight years under Franklin Roosevelt, apparently figured that FDR would retire after two terms and hand over the nomination to his second-in-command. Imagine his surprise when FDR went for No. 3.

Now there’s a history lesson Pence should keep in mind.

Thomas Marshall, who was Woodrow Wilson’s veep, used to tell the story of two brothers: “One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again.” You could appreciate his attitude since he was frozen out of everything in the Wilson administration, even after the president himself was paralyzed from a stroke.

But these are stories from the old days, when a vice president counted himself reasonably lucky if he was given a project — an agency or an issue — that gave him an excuse for coming into work in the morning. The job turned into something very different in modern times.

Having a relatively powerful, activist vice president worked very well when the guy in question was Walter Mondale. But pitfalls abounded. You may remember that Republican Dan Quayle made headlines when he corrected a schoolchild for spelling “potato” without an E at the end. There was some applause from the adults in the room, which just goes to show you that politicians should not always trust the instincts of the base.