A Heartbeat Is Too Close for Just a Buzz

A quarter of a century has gone by since Endicott “Chub” Peabody, then governor of Massachusetts, proposed that both national parties pick their vice presidential nominees the way they pick their presidential candidates--through primaries, state by state.

Peabody had the right idea, but the country wasn’t ready for it in the mid-1970s. Or, for that matter, by 1980, the year I worked with George Bush the Elder as a speechwriter and senior advisor.

It was in fact 20 years ago this month that the quirky nature of how we pick our vice presidents was brought home to me as I sat in a Detroit room with other Bush staffers, waiting for word that our candidate had been named Ronald Reagan’s running mate. Instead we heard, through a Walter Cronkite interview, that the Republican ticket for 1980 apparently would be Reagan-Ford, not Reagan-Bush.

Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford? Except for creating a momentary media buzz, the pairing made little political sense. But given the history of the vice-presidential selection process since the Democrats’ Los Angeles convention in 1960, it was predictable.

Ever since John F. Kennedy stunned the political world that year by naming Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, presidential candidates of both parties have gone out of their way to do the unexpected in choosing their vice presidents. Kennedy picked Johnson for sound political reasons, not to create a media buzz. But his imitators seem to have missed the point with embarrassing, sometimes politically disastrous, consequences.

Reagan’s brief Ford fling (abandoned when the buzz died down) proved only an embarrassment. But from Mondale’s surprising choice of little-known U.S. Rep. Geraldine Ferraro of New York in 1984, to Bush’s jaw-dropping selection of little-known Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana in 1988, we’ve seen the process move from buzz to buzz, as if the person picked as next in line to the presidency were part of a media game, a fitting subject for office pools.

The presidential candidates who orchestrate the game insist otherwise, of course. They furrow their brows and form search committees to assure us that they take the running-mate question seriously. The vice presidency, they say, is too important an office to be filled as an afterthought.

Peabody’s point exactly. The people at the polls, he argued, not politicians behind closed doors, should decide who is best qualified to hold the nation’s second-highest office. In the 1970s, we saw the presidential nominating process opened up, expanding the role of popular primaries and reducing the influence of power brokers. All Peabody asked was that the same standard be applied in choosing the man or woman who will stand one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

The downside of the Peabody plan? You can hear the naysayers now. First, those who’ll argue that the running-mate question is the only suspense left at our national conventions: presidential politics, in other words, as a television game show (Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania? Frank Keating of Oklahoma? Who’ll be the Republican survivor?)

Then there are those who will argue the “comfort factor,” the odd notion that the presidential nominee has to feel comfortable with his running mate. This would come as a surprise to framers of the Constitution, whose original idea was that the person best qualified to serve as vice president is the president’s foremost opponent--the candidate who ran second in the presidential vote. (Did John Adams feel “comfortable” with Thomas Jefferson? No. Did the country have the best possible successor in place if something had happened to Adams? Yes.)

So much for the naysayers. The upside of the Peabody plan is that, beyond removing the last vestige of the old brokered convention system, it would have a winnowing effect on the presidential primaries, now cluttered by candidates with little or no realistic chance of being nominated.

Case in point: Elizabeth Dole. Talented, experienced, but in her first race for elective office, not quite convincing as a presidential candidate. How much better would it have been for her and her party had she set her sights this year on the second spot on the Republican national ticket? Or, for that matter, if Al Gore, looking for the running mate most likely to help his chances in the fall, had his question answered not by quirky instinct or shaky polls, but live voters in the primaries?

It’s something for the parties to consider as they look for ways to upgrade the process in 2004 and beyond. Peabody was on to something. But like a lot of people in the mid-1970s, he was a man ahead of his time.