Even rightwing nutbags concede that Palin was the least responsible pick from a variety of viewpoints: extremely limited track record, totally unknown outside her home state, almost no education, many embarrassing relatives, etc., so I’m looking for nominees for second place. John Edwards? Quayle? Nixon? Perhaps even more than nominees, can we come up with a rubric for judging VP candidates? First and foremost, I think, would be “ability to serve as POTUS,” but there are a lot of other factors that would come into play in terms of a “responsible” choice.
Henry Wallace, FDR’s vice-president from 1941 to early 1945.
He had some farsighted progressive views. Trouble was, he thought Stalin did too. (Wallace even visited a camp in the Soviet gulag and praised it.)
Only after 1948 did he realize the danger posed by the Soviets; he acknowledged this himself in an article titled “Where I Was Wrong.”
Had Roosevelt died just a few months earlier, Wallace would have become president. He would never have stood up to Stalin after the war – quite the opposite – and so the history of postwar Europe would have been very different. We would have had no Truman Doctrine, and (at the very, very least) Greece might well have gone communist.
From the Wikipedia entry for James Stockdale:
Most of the rest of what I know about Stockdale (which isn’t a lot) makes him sound like a very brave and capable person, but he doesn’t seem to have been at all prepared for his time as a Vice Presidential candidate.
Nixon has a very high score in this game. He was only 39 when Ike selected him, with two terms as a Representative and half a term as a Senator as political experience. He did nothing but demagogue while in office. He was chosen for the same reasons as Palin, a sop to the nutbag right.
Nevertheless, Chester A. Arthur wins with a Simone Biles level of impossible achievement. He never had been elected to office or even a candidate for one. He was nothing but a party hack. Grant appointed him as Collector of the Port of New York as a favor to New York political boss Senator Russell Conklin. Already in charge of distributing patronage, Arthur loved this promotion. Huge amounts of money flowed through this position and it was notoriously corrupting, because the law allowed the taking of a portion of fines. He literally made more than the President.
Hayes fired him as part of a sweeping clean-up of the spoils system and Arthur became head of the Republican Party in New York (a position he remained in for a bit even after he became President; think about that).
Garfield offered him the Veepship as, you’ll never guess, a sop to the nutbag right of the Republican Party.
Amazingly, he served as a fairly decent president for the day and made him name by continuing civil service reform. But absolutely nobody in the country would have predicted that in 1880.
Thomas Eagleton in 1972 would probably be a contender, even if he didn’t make it all the way to November. His candidacy went badly enough at the time, and looks worse now after Robert Novak revealed that Eagleton was the one who called McGovern the candidate of “amnesty, abortion, and acid.”
One of Lincoln’s most unfortunate decisions was selecting Andrew Johnson as his running mate in 1864. It made some sense politically – Johnson was a War Democrat who could balance the ticket (Lincoln and Johnson ran as the “National Union” Party rather than as Republicans that year). But Johnson himself was poorly suited to the Presidency – he was incredibly stubborn, made enemies out of everyone, and got so drunk the night before his inauguration that he could barely slur his way through his inaugural address. There’s a reason why he consistently makes the bottom five of historians’ rankings of U.S. Presidents.
Yeah I don’t even know that I can agree Palin is the consensus worst pick. I think McCain was making a decent calculation he needed help with firing up the populist right, because he wasn’t amazing at that. His polling actually, if I’m remembering correctly, improved after picking Palin. What came out over time is clearly Palin wasn’t vetted very well, she was fairly lightly covered by the press prior to her pick and she had mostly gotten positive press with conservatives and not too much bad national press. The moment any serious digging was done, or she was put on a national stage, the problems started to emerge fairly obviously. So I do think the pick of Palin, since it was clearly an unvetted pick, was quite bad, but probably not the worst.
It is highly likely the Jefferson faction in 1800 made a serious blunder, maybe the most serious ever, in promoting Burr as their Vice Presidential candidate; given the mechanics of how the electoral college worked this meant Burr would need to come in 2nd place of course in the EC (since each elector had two votes), the two factions/parties at the time tried to deliberately stagger the electors’ second votes so that their preferred VP would have 1 less vote than their preferred President. But a bureaucratic fuckup shit the bed on that one and they accidentally cast equal votes for Burr and Jefferson. Burr immediately tried to actually whip for the Presidency basically betraying his own faction, which was highly in line with Burr’s manifest lack of character and dishonest nature–his later involvement in a duel that killed Alexander Hamilton and an ill-fated plot to perhaps commit treason and establish a new republic in the interior west of the Ohio River wrap up a fairly bad legacy of behavior for Burr.
One odd bright spot is Burr was perhaps 200 years ahead of his time on women’s rights–he was one of the few politicians of the 18th century who radically believed the two sexes were truly equal and deserving of equal political rights.
Perhaps a slight hijack, but while I don’t dispute that Palin was a horrible pick to anyone outside the Republican realm (and so a lead weight when it came to a general election), she was a very good pick to a large portion of the R brand that wanted to prove that women weren’t automatically D-leaning. She supported all of their values (of the time) and yet was strong and independent. They thought that she’d appeal beyond their base, and they greatly misjudged, and that’s not counting the rest of her baggage.
Of course, from another POV - she was just ahead of her time. Tell me you don’t see shades of Palin and what the Republican party has become/is becoming in Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert?
Okay, back to the OP - I think we need to at least throw a mention of Spiro Agnew, I mean if we’re going to talk about unexploded ordinance in a candidate, he’s waaaaaaay up there. I know we put ‘ability to serve as POTUS’ as a main consideration, but his history of gaffes and criminal actions (I mean, how dare he get caught!) definitely should give him an honorable mention at least.
But that was still a pander to the Republican base. I sincerely doubt that any undecided woman voter in that election voted for McCain because Palin was on the ticket. In fact, I would submit that the pick cost McCain some crucial votes, particularly after Palin’s less-than-intelligent comments during a few interviews.
I would submit Bob Dole in 1976 as a poor VP pick. At the time, he was a little-known Senator from Kansas who had been carrying Nixon’s water until he realized it was political suicide to continue that practice. He brought nothing to the Ford ticket, which was crucial in what turned out to be a close election.
And he didn’t even balance the ticket, because there was already a crook on it.
The OP asked for a rubric for judging VP candidates. I think that leads to an important question: How are VP candidates typically vetted?
Let’s talk in general, but also specifically Sarah Palin. I agree with those who speculate that part of the reason she was chosen was her sex. I’ve thought since she was announced as McCain’s running mate that part of the reason was a belief that women Dems, upset that Hillary didn’t get the nomination, would vote for McCain with the rationale that if they couldn’t have Madam President, at least they could have Madam Vice President. Yes, I agree that’s stupid, but remember that some of those in charge quite clearly believe that it’s impossible for a person to have both a vagina and a brain.
What I don’t understand is how poorly vetted she was. It shouldn’t have taken all that much time to realize given her limited track record and broad ignorance of so many important issues she was a poor pick.
And it’s not like they had limited time to vet the VP possibilities. McCain was the presumptive candidate in early March, six months before the GOP convention. Surely they were weighing their choices for VP as early as mid-March.
I don’t think Dole was a bad pick. Ford was in a difficult position. Reagan’s attempt to wrest the nomination – which he only lost by a convention floor vote of 1,187 to 1,070 – had left a lot of bad blood between Ford’s camp and conservatives. Ford felt he needed to heal that divide to have a united party behind him, and Dole was broadly acceptable to conservatives without having alienated anyone in either camp.
Of course the ticket didn’t win, but I can’t think of another likely VP candidate who would have changed the outcome.
But that’s the thing…Dole brought no national appeal to the Ford ticket. The GOP ticket won 27 states (including California) and lost the popular vote by only 1.7 million votes. With a candidate with better name recognition and a bit more charisma, they might have won the electoral vote.
Howard Baker might have been a better choice.
I think we’re floating far afield from the OP’s point, and since I’m the OP, may I reiterate that point? It’s irresponsible choices, not un-pragmatic or unjustifiable ones. Mainly I think that means choices that could have had ruinous consequences for the country or the world. Now admittedly I think personally that Donald Trump would have been a more irresponsible choice than Sarah Palin, but he wasn’t a VP choice, so forget him, except to say that picking a brainless, spineless, heartless person as the VP is what I’m talking about, and it matters not if that choice helped the ticket, was chosen for a sound reason, was a compromise for regional balance or anything else.
It should be noted that John Edward’s affair did not begin until well after the election of 2004. It’s hard to call someone a bad pick over something that hadn’t happened yet. BTW, Spiro gets my vote. His criminality extended back to his days as county Exec.
Palin was supposed to have two things going for her: (1) not going to have any embarrassing scandals come out of her closet (2) not going to open her mouth and say something stupid. Assuming these were the desired criteria, as they would be, far from being irresponsible, absolutely necessary anyway the problem was not with the criteria but with the vetters not doing their job.
Does anyone think that was his first affair? A dog’s a dog.
Yeah, the Wasilla Hillbilly was a wretched pick. Andrew Johnson was another, I think Lincoln would have won with someone more in line with his thinking and Reconstruction would have been handled infinitely better with someone (nearly anyone) else. It would have been like LBJ picking George Wallace.
Although the Mondale campaign was a lost cause, Geraldine Ferraro was a weak pick. A little thin on experience and pretty unlikeable, she seemed every bit the token pick that she was.
I don’t really remember that being Palin’s appeal. I remember having seen Palin get a little bit of national press prior to being tapped, frequently in pieces that called her the “future of the party” and things like that. Her rise in Alaska politics had been meteoric, and she was frequently doing things that really endured her with the anti-elite element of the party. Most notably too, she wasn’t giving interviews or getting quoted in the press as being stupid or a nutbar. She had ran several genuine anti-corruption efforts in Alaska politics, targeting sometimes entrenched corrupt actors in the state. Something that got her a ton of national press
She ran in the Republican gubernatorial primary and unseated incumbent governor Frank Murkowski–who had long been a Senator in the State (Lisa’s dad), which got her lots of attention as an up and comer. Before he stint on the Presidential ticket she frequently had approval ratings in Alaska over 80% and she was on lists of “most popular Governor.”
I don’t really remember the argument FOR Palin being “she has no scandals” and “she won’t say anything stupid”, to be honest that’s a baseline expectation of most VP nominees (and the ones who can’t even clear that barrier end up being known as bad picks most of the time), it was more that she (in theory) broadened the ticket’s appeal. McCain was historically strong with college educated Republicans, defense hawk Republicans, Wall Street Republicans and what I would call “good government” Republicans. Where he never had much appeal in a natural sense is with rural Republicans in blue collar places–areas that traditionally leaned blue in many cases but that were, back in 2008, starting their transition to being parts of the Republican coalition.
McCain was the son of an Admiral, a graduate of the Naval Academy, a decade war hero, the husband of a wealthy heiress and a Senator with something like 30 years of tenure when he ran for President. He was not naturally good in dealing with lower education, culturally conservative people. Palin had conservative Christian and pro-Life bona fides that McCain just never had. Despite a more or less perfect voting record in favor of pro-life issues in his political career, the reality is McCain was never seen as “part of” the religious right and always had trouble interacting with them. Time magazine’s profile of Palin right after she was selected, but before he star fell, I think is pretty apt:
John McCain needs to persuade swing voters that he’s willing to take on the Republican establishment. He needs to persuade conservatives that he isn’t squishy about social issues. And he needs to close the gender gap. When you think about it, the real surprise about Sarah Palin’s selection as his running mate is that it’s such a surprise.
@Martin_Hyde: That nailed it. Thank you!
In many ways, Palin really was the future of the R party.
Between when Palin was selected as VP candidate in 2008 and when Trump first emerged in 2014-ish, Palin was already positioned just about exactly where the R’s ended up going: Elevating rural know-nothingness and the Cruel branch of Christianity to become the main pillars of R party orthodoxy.
Then Trump came along and grabbed what was left and drug it into dangerous cuckoo no-kidding authoritarian crony kleptocracy land.