Right the big thing that did Palin in, for what it’s worth, wasn’t her political extremism (by the standards of 2008, she would just be a middle of the road Republican by today’s standards), it was her low intelligence and lack of general knowledge. These two things had largely never been exposed because she’d never had to deal with the national press on a daily basis and had to answer questions from pool reporters every single day for weeks on end. Put under that level of exposure she revealed, and frequently, that she was ignorant of a lot of basics of government and policy and wasn’t too bright. But her resume and collection of political appeals prior to that made a lot of sense.
We’re being extremely unfair to Dan Quayle. He was every bit as incompetent and ignorant as Palin.
Palin also had a remarkably short fuse for anyone in public life when her ignorance was pointed out. She seemed to take every bit of criticism, however gentle (and most weren’t too gentle) as an attack in need of an immediate and powerful counter-attack.
I have always assumed it was his first affair. Absent evidence to the contrary, I’ll stick with that. A fair number of people don’t have affairs, until one day they do.
Returning to the topic of bad VP picks, this thread has been a good reminder about how many bad ones their have been. On the other hand, at least we’ve had Mondale, Gore, and Harris. (if we want to go bi-partisan, I’ll add George H.W. Bush)
No one has mentioned Alabama senator John Sparkman, Adlai Stevenson’s choice in 1952. He was chosen to avoid a Dixiecrat opponent who had nearly pushed the 1948 election into the HR. But he was an ardent segregationist. Here is a paragraph from the LA Times’s obit:
In 1948, Sparkman had opposed the renomination of President Harry S. Truman because of the President’s civil rights program. In advocating laws against lynching, poll taxes and employment discrimination, the President had committed a “colossal blunder,” Sparkman said.
Agree to disagree, I guess. Obviously there’s no way to determine if/how another VP would have influenced the election, and Baker would have brought his own plusses and minuses (for instance, his public role in the Watergate hearings may have pushed some Nixon loyalists to stay home on election day). But in the context of the OP talking about the least responsible VP picks in history, I’d put Dole in the middle of the pack.
Mostly, I think that it is pretty rare for the VP selection to have any significant impact on the outcome of a Presidential election. Mostly their job is just to not screw up, which is why Palin is leading the pack for poor VP picks.
Totally agree!
It’s a little vague to me even the parameters of the discussion.
Are we talking worst VP pick because of how they negatively affected the campaign? If so I go back to it being hard to top Bur–he outright tried to steal the election from Jefferson in the House, which is a fairly negative impact on Jefferson’s bid for the Presidency, and probably more actively damaging than anything any other VP nominee I can think of really did. I think most VP nominees had minimal impact on the campaigns, to be honest.
I think Palin stands out as having hurt McCain’s campaign, as did Thomas Eagleton’s selection hurt the McGovern campaign. Probably Eagleton is the #2 after burr.
If we are talking bad because they went on to prove themselves poorly suited for high office / being a good Vice President/President, I think the list is a tad longer. That adds to it men like Andrew Johnson, Spiro Agnew, John Nance Garner, John Calhoun.
Calhoun is interesting as a bad choice twice (or arguably three times) over. In the Election of 1824, before running mates were quite as rigidly set as they are now, both John Q. Adams and Andrew Jackson (and two other lesser candidates) were all members of the Democratic-Republican party. Calhoun had withdrawn from consideration earlier in the campaign season, and as he was a somewhat popular figure in the South and had good name recognition as Secretary of War, the supporters of John Q. Adams advocated for Calhoun as Vice President. Andrew Jackson’s coalition likewise did the same.
Unlike in modern times neither candidate personally “selected” him, in 1824, but it is likely given the shadowy ways the candidates ran their campaigns they both were involved in making the decision. [I say shadowy because in that era it was considered unseemly for the nominee to seem to be deeply involved in their own campaign, they typically of course, were, but they would run it more quietly through aides and associates.] For Adams Calhoun was a terrible choice as Calhoun opposed almost all of Adams policies, and he was personally disloyal as Vice President, publicly coming out in support, and agreeing to be the running mate of, Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election. For Jackson Calhoun likely was a bad choice in both 1824 and 1828, as his disloyalty and interpersonal issues with Jackson had been a consistent issue dating back to Calhoun opposing Jackson’s invasion of Florida as a general. They had a brief rapprochement as they were sworn into office together, but the Petticoat Affair quickly turned the men against one another and Calhoun was a thorn in Jackson’s side for the rest of his Presidency (and was a major instigator of the Nullification Crisis that Jackson had to deal with.)
No hate yet for Joe Lieberman? Back in 2000 Gore didn’t yet have the reputation as a far left radical environmentalist who claimed he invented the internet that the right has since unfairly saddled him with. Gore would have likely been better off going with a more liberal VP.
Interesting thread. That is really fascinating about John C. Calhoun (a horribly evil person, it must be said). He got elected Vice President, then switched parties and got re-elected! Seems safe to assume that feat won’t be duplicated any time soon.
My understanding is that the OP intended the question to be “most obviously, dangerously unqualified at the time they were nominated”. Best answers so far seem to be Palin and Arthur, then probably Agnew.
Caveat: obviously Palin, like all modern politicians, is at a huge disadvantage here relative to anyone who ran before the era of TV and mass media. Maybe if videocameras had been invented, we’d know what a drooling idiot William A. Wheeler (hypothetically) was.
Gore did have that reputation in 2000 (One of Bush’s stump speech lines was something along the lines of if Gore invented the internet, why does every webpage begin with W? Not just one, but three?) and he was a big environmentalist before that.
This is exactly why he picked a conservative like Lieberman to balance the ticket.
I remember 2000 being the “who would you rather hang out at a bar and have a beer with” election. The main policy debate that I recall is what should we do with this newly created budget surplus. Good times 
. I was also in my second year of medical school, and may have missed out on the finer details of the campaign.
But to answer the OP, I would have to go with Burr. A corrupt and immoral guy like him being the 3rd or 4th President of the United States would have been a disaster for a young country. I would put Burr first and Palin second.
I thought Quayle had an undeserved reputation for being a dunce. He was a young , a poor public speaker and his bumbling way speaking gave that impression, but I know of nothing except the minor potato/potatoe incident to suggest he was stupid.
I think the “have a beer with” reputation was always significantly exaggerated in 2000. Also technically no contest–Gore was a drinker, Bush had been a teetotaler for something like 14 years or so by the time he ran for President.
Gore also dominated in the typical “blue collar” demos. He won every income bracket up to the $50,000-$79,999 bracket (the slice was about 47% of the electorate), he won union households 59%-37% (shockingly they were still 26% of the electorate in 2000.)
Bush also didn’t show any signs of a commanding victory in the exit polling on questions the map to “relatability.” In fact he did poorly in most of them. In a poll of what mattered most to people who cast their vote (in the form of questions), “He cares about people like me” was 16% of the electorate, Gore won them by 8 points; “He understands average American problems” was 13% of the electorate and Gore won them by 6 points; “He is personally likeable” at only 5% of the electorate, Bush won, but only by 3 points.
Well, here are a few notable quotes to help you out.
We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.
27 September 1990When you take the UNCF model that, what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.
9 May 1989The other day [the President] said, I know you’ve had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. Would you like a puppy?
16 May 1989Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
11 August 1989I have been asked who caused the riots and the killing in L. A. My answer has been direct and simple. Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.
19 May 1992If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure.
23 March 1990
Two things
Thing the first- Thanks to all who have posted so far.
Thing the second- One of the greatest crimes comitted in our schools is to take history and make it boring.
If you think of the VP pick as of great symbolic and practical import, it’s amazing how many Presidential candidates have failed. Symbolic because it’s his first chance to show the nation how he makes choices, and practically because this is a crucial choice. Essentially his whole campaign boils down to “I am the best-qualified person in the universe to lead the country” but his VP pick is “and this is who I think is the second-best qualified person.” When you get a blatantly political pick like Quayle or Palin it’s like he (McCain or Bush sr. in these cases) is giving up, just saying “OK there are obviously hundreds if not thousands of more qualified people to be POTUS than these bozos but this is the pick that I think will improve my chances of getting elected the most.”
On paper I don’t really know that Quayle was a crazy pick from a perspective of “this is an okay person to be a fill-in President if the President dies.” Quayle was a lawyer, had served 5 years as a civil servant in Indiana, had served two terms as a Congressman from Indiana, and a full term as U.S. Senator from Indiana and was in his second term when selected to run for the Vice Presidency. Usually winning four campaigns and serving over 10 years in Federal office would mostly exclude truly incompetent/crazy people–this was, in my opinion, much truer in the 70s and 80s than it is today, back then both parties exerted a lot of influence in the primary process and helped keep out a lot of the trash that gets into office today.
I don’t really see anything prior to his involvement in the Vice Presidency that would suggest Quayle is an imbecile. So he either hid it very well to that point, or he just wasn’t good at regular public speaking (which, surprising to many, may not have been something he did all that often as a House member or Senator, campaigns for those offices frequently involve a lot of glad handling and backslapping, going to dinners and events, and reading pre-written speeches, but not nearly as much off the cuff and recorded back and forth as a national-level political figure like the Vice President faces.)
I honestly don’t know enough about Quayle to know if he’s really as stupid as the gaffes he committed suggest he was, he could very well be. But I also think it’s way easier than most people believe to misspeak when you suddenly are going to have every word you utter in public recorded and replayed to the entire country, and where any muddling or confusing of words is going to become a national punch line. The misspelling of potato was pretty damn bad, but I also think a lot of decently intelligent people probably fuck up spelling.
I guess we just differ in our evaluations of Quayle’s non-nominal qualifications to serve as POTUS in 1989. It’s not the misspeaking–that was just additional evidence to me. It’s the absence of ideas. I didn’t review his credentials and say, “Oh, he’s a brilliant, insightful ___________” or “I love the way he thinks on _________.” I might have loved him as a potential neighbor, or co-worker, or guy sitting next to me at a ballgame, but I’m not looking for brilliant leadership in those positions. A VP pick says to me, “I think this guy is clearly qualified to lead the nation for four years, if need be” and I never got a glimmer of that vibe off Quayle. I did catch a heavy whiff of “entitled, clueless, nepotistic doofus.”
The foremost consideration in choosing a VP is whether he or she will help get the ticket elected. If they don’t get elected, it doesn’t matter how good either one of them would have been at presidenting. If people voted based on whether or not they thought the VP pick would make a good President then you would see things change, but there’s no evidence that they do. So pretty much since the 12th Amendment was adopted, the goal has been to choose someone who can pass a minimum standard of plausibility as a potential President while addressing a perceived political weakness at the top of the ticket.
And the pick is almost always aimed at shoring up support in the Presidential candidate’s own party, rather than reaching out to new voters or trying to woo independents or members of the other party. Often it’s about trying to reconcile the establishment/insurgent divide within a party. Or it may be about the ticket building credibility with a particularly important faction within the party (I think a lot of people underestimate just how important Mike Pence was to Trump in 2016 by helping an amoral, thrice-divorced, previously pro-choice candidate win overwhelming support among evangelicals). But it’s almost always about helping make sure that your own voters show up at the polls.