The other day, it took me about five seconds to remember who the vice-president of the USA is.
While this memory lapse might suggest premature senility, I wonder whether it’s attributable to an extremely low profile by Mr. Biden.
Does Mr. Biden do as much as previous VPs, but is simply not as publicized or reported on? Should he hire a publicist?
Hell, I even remember Gerald Ford’s VP–Nelson Rockefeller. And from reading a history book eons ago, that Harry Truman did not have a VP in his first term.
But Biden seems to be such an absence…is it excessive anti-charisma or something?
No, VPs only rarely had any role at all. Cheney was a serious abberation. Who recalls who Truman’s VP was (Alben Barkley). Unless they ran for president or ascended to office, they were nearly always unknown.
LBJ once noted “Hell, Ah keep Hubert’s balls in mah back pocket”.
It’s really only since Carter made Mondale effectively his Chief of Staff that the VP even had close day to day involvement in the White House. The standard joke that the job was to look good in a suit at a foreign funeral is pretty well faded by now.
And it’s only been since Cheney that the VP of a two-term administration was not pretty much automatically the party’s next nominee for President. It isn’t clear why Biden has never publicly been interested.
That’s wrong. AFAIK, Nixon in 1960 was the first VP to seriously try to become his party’s nominee and he won the nomination, but lost the election (officially, anyway). Before that I cannot think VP who then ran for president unless he had already acceeded to the office.
Before Eisenhower’s, there were no legally term-limited administrations anyway. Both of FDR’s VP’s from his third and fourth terms ran in 1948, btw (Garner was probably just too old by then even if he had support). To find a two-termer whose VP did not run to succeed him, you have to go back to Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Marshall in 1918, and even then Wilson’s departure from office was forced on him by his stroke.
VP’s typically only got some recognition when they took on some special project, possibly assigned by the Prez.
For example, Jackie became well-known for that Beautify America campaign, and Hilary became well-known for that (somewhat serious) attempt to establish a nation-wide government-sponsored health care program.
This. Carter’s giving Mondale a nontrivial role in policymaking was what changed the veep job into something meaningful. Before then, Garner’s line, and Tom Lehrer’s song, were accurate reflections of the job.
That said, it does seem that Biden’s profile has been not only lower than Cheney’s (and given that Cheney was President in all but name for a few years, it would have been hard to beat that), but also lower than that of Gore or Quayle, although with Quayle one has to take into account that he was a high-profile laughingstock.
Although back then the VP was the guy who finished 2nd in the election, rather than the candidate’s hand-picked running mate. So by definition the VPs back then all had presidential aspirations.
