Why do you think they call him VICE
Men who have been American vice-presidential candidates have bad records as presidential candidates and as presidents. It doesn't matter whether they held office as vice-president or not. Whether they won or not, the results are generally less than satisfactory. The historical message is unambiguous: vice-presidential candidates tend to lose as presidential candiates. Or they become undistinguished presidents -- at best! Many have shown an unusual ability to split and destroy their parties. There is a way out: history suggests that serving a stint as governor of a state lifts the Veep jinx.
John Adams	The first US Vice-President established the pattern. Who could expect to follow George Washington, anyway? Even though Adams was a prominent politician and one of the founding fathers, he served one chaotic term and then was defeated when his party split.
Aaron Burr	Didn't exactly run for Vice-President, but was accidentally tied with Jefferson when the election took place. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives and Burr would not stand down voluntarily. After 36 ballots, Jefferson was elected with Hamilton's support. But under the rules as they were then, Burr the runner-up became vice-president. After the Burr fiasco, the rules were changed and for the most of the nineteenth century, the vice-president became a political appendage. But that didn't stop them from causing trouble for the country and their parties.
John C. Calhoun	While Calhoun never became a presidential nominee, he deserves honorable mention as a purveyor of vice-mischief. Vice-president to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Calhoun resigned to go back to South Carolina and proclaim that states had a right to nullify federal laws they didn't like.
Martin Van Buren	Van Buren had created the New York political machine that became the cornerstone of the Democratic party and hitched his machine to Andrew Jackson's star. But after being vice-president to Jackson, replacing Calhoun, Van Buren was a disaster on his own. He lost after one term in the White House to the chant of "Van, Van is a used-up man!" Van Buren had the nerve to run again in 1844, but the nomination went to James K. Polk after the convention deadlocked. Later, Van Buren became the presidential candidate of the Free Soil party, the first but not the last time an ex-veep would be involved in a third party movement.
John Tyler	Up til now, nobody considered that the President might actually die in office, least of all the Whig party, who had nominated Tyler, a Democrat, to broaden their appeal. When William Henry Harrison died after making the longest inaugural address to this day, Tyler stepped in and started acting more like a Democrat than a Whig, leading to an unsuccessful impeachment attempt. Some Democrats wanted to nominate him for re-election, but he stepped aside.
Millard Fillmore	Fillmore, the second Whig vice-president to succeed to office, presided over the break-up of his party. He was not renominated, and in 1856 became the candidate of the American (formerly Know-Nothing) party, coming in third behind the new Republican party.
John Breckinridge	In the Civil War tragedy, vice-presidents play a significant role. Breckinridge was Buchanan's pro-slavery vice-president, who became the Presidential nominee for the pro-slavery wing when the Democrats split before the 1860 election. He went on to help form the Confederate government of Kentucky. Since Kentucky did not secede, this is perhaps the most striking instance of a vice-president being both troublesome and ineffective. (But see Henry Wallace, below.)
Andrew Johnson	The most ill-starred vice-presidential choice of all. Johnson was pro-slavery and pro-union, a road that few people held once the Confederacy was established. He was the only Southern Senator not to resign. Abraham Lincoln picked him to run after he served as military governor of Tennessee. It was a bad omen when Johnson showed up drunk at Lincoln's inaugural. After Lincoln's assasination, Johnson did just what John Tyler had done 25 years earlier -- he acted more like a Democrat than a Republican. He let Confederate supporters return to power and did nothing to stop Southern attempts to deprive former slaves of civil rights. The response from Congress was the same as the response to Tyler, just more intense. The Republican congress first tried to strip him of power, then impeached him and came within one vote of removing him from office. Like Tyler before him, he was considered for the Democratic nomination in 1868, but not very seriously.
Chester Alan Arthur	After a disgruntled office seeker shot James Garfield, Arthur signed the act creating the civil service. Now we have disgruntled civil servants who shoot fellow employees and the public, but the President doesn't have to worry. Arthur did not strongly pursue renomination because he himself was dying of kidney failure.
Theodore Roosevelt	TR ushered in the 20th-century style vice-presidents who are national political figures in their own right. He was put on the McKinley ticket by the New York machine to get him out of the state house. After McKinley was assassinated, Teddy enjoyed huge popularity and ran successfully for re-election, and decided not to run again. Then he changed his mind. He ran in Republican primaries against his protege Taft and won them. But the convention system he himself designed defeated him. So he started a third party. The upshot was an end to the Republican lock on the White House. But the major result was that Progressivism as an issue was taken over by the Democrats (as the Democrats are now taking over the ideas of limited government and fiscal responsibility). The Bull Moose broke a lot of china, and we're still picking up the pieces. The only vice-president on Mt. Rushmore.
Thomas Riley Marshall	Woodrow Wilson's vice-president for two terms, Marshall tried and failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1920. Until the advent of television the vice-president was in a poor position to get the presidential nod. Marshall is supposedly famous for saying, "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar."
Calvin Coolidge	Re-elected once. Did not choose to run again.
Charles Gates Dawes	Coolidge's vice-president had won a Nobel Peace Prize (1925) for helping to restructure Germany's reparations after the collapse of the German economy. But as a candidate, he failed miserably against Herbert Hoover in 1928 and ran again with worse results when Hoover was doomed in 1932.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt	FDR ran as the vice-presidential candidate in 1920. The next year he contracted polio and his life and ours changed forever. We barely remember FDR's first national campaign because it was his service as governor of New York that got him the nomination 12 years later. FDR thus avoided the electoral jinx on vice-presidential candidates, but his three vice-presidents carried on the tradition.
John Nance Garner	"Cactus Jack" helped make history. His candidacy in 1940 was one of the reasons FDR decided to end the tradition of two-term presidents. It was quite a turn around. When Garner was first nominated as vice-president, there were some who felt he was more qualified than Roosevelt. Obviously, Roosevelt grew while Garner didn't, or maybe the vice-presidential jinx was at work (see George Bush, below). Garner was actually running behind postmaster general Farley for the nomination. Then FDR engineered a draft at the Democratic convention that left both Garner and Farley in the dust. It gave Roosevelt the chance to drop the conservative Garner as veep, as well.
Henry Wallace	FDR's vice-president from 1941 to 1945. Ran against Harry Truman in 1948 (sibling rivalry?) Wallace had been booted out of Truman's cabinet after saying that HST was too hard on Russia! He started his own third party. He called it "Progressive" just to confuse us, but it has no connection with Teddy Roosevelt's Progressives. Wallace collected a tiny fraction of the vote, and Truman won depite his interference.
Harry Truman	Who could follow FDR, anyway? Truman has a tumultuous time with a radical Republican congress (does this sound familiar?) Had a legendary upset re-election victory, but declined to run again after that.
Alben William Barkley	Truman's vice-president, Barkley wanted the nomination in 1952, but his candidacy went nowhere because of his age (74).
Richard Nixon	Who could follow Eisenhower, anyway? Nixon is the first vice-president since the Civil War who was nominated to the Presidency and failed -- until Hubert Humphrey, the man he defeated in 1968. Then, in true veep-to-president form, Nixon failed to complete his two terms under threat of impeachment from a radical Democratic congress (have we been here before?)
Lyndon Johnson	Johnson's selection harkens back to the original Presidential nominating system, where the runner up becomes vice-president. He, Martin Van Buren and Richard Nixon are probably the only vice-presidents who entered the office with more political experience than the President he served under. After a flush of grief and sympathy, Johnson was re-elected in a landslide. Then he split the party over Vietnam and wisely declined to run for another term.
Hubert Humphrey	LBJ didn't stab him in the back exactly, but his implacable position on Vietnam didn't help, either. The 1968 race is the first in U.S. history between two vice-presidents, which is what the pundits are looking to repeat in 2000 with Gore vs. Kemp.
Edmund Muskie	Muskie inaugurates the television-era phenomenon that even losing vice-presidential candidates become the de facto Presidential front runner in the next election, because of the media-recognition factor. But Muskie wept and didn't even get the nomination. The eventual nominees' first vice-presidential choice, Thomas Eagleton, proved himself one of the few sane ones by not running for President.
Gerald Ford	By the seventies, vice-presidents became the candidates by default. Ford, unelected vice-president to unelected President, runs with Bob Dole, remains unelected. Thereafter, Bob Dole starts running for President and keeps losing with increasing success.
Walter Mondale	Since Jimmy Carter lost in 1980, Mondale, the losing vice-president, gets the mantle in 1984. He loses worse than Carter did. If it weren't for lingering sexism, Geraldine Ferraro could have lost in 1988 rather than Michael Dukakis.
George Bush	Who could follow Ronald Reagan, anyway? In picking Bush, Reagan followed the "runner up" theory of VP selection (that is, pick the loser). After Reagan, Bush beat Dole, another ex-veep-candidate, for the nomination. In office, George Bush looked promising and even won a war, but, like LBJ, he couldn't beat the VP jinx. How else can you explain his dramatic fall from unprecedented high approval ratings? Bush lost in a three-way race (nothing new here: see John Adams, Martin Van Buren, William Howard Taft and, almost, Harry Truman). But once again, the losing vice-president, Dan Quayle, is perversely regarded by the media as Presidential timber.
Bob Dole	With VP-candidate-to-Presidential-candidate pattern well established, Dole's candidacy and his loss seem inevitable.
Al Gore, Jack Kemp (and Dan Quayle)	Can't you guys think of something better to do with your lives? How about a nice Supreme Court seat? Look at the historical record: the only way for a vice-president to have a successful Presidency is to follow FDR and become a governor first!
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