Inspired by the President Harris thread, in our lifetimes, say since 1960, which vice president do you think would have been better than the president they served under?
Well Pence would have been better than Trump but that is a really low bar.
Mondale probably would have been better than Carter as Carter was pretty ineffective.
Reagan rallied America but Papa Bush was probably a better person and POTUS overall. This one is close.
Well, let’s look at the list:
- Lyndon Johnson (Kennedy) - given Johnson’s accomplishments once he succeeded Kennedy (Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, Voting Rights Act, creation of Medicare), it’s possible that LBJ would have been even better than Kennedy from the start.
- Hubert Humphrey (Johnson) - as a leader in the Senate, was instrumental in achieving some of JFK’s and LBJ’s initiatives. Might be close
- Spiro Agnew (Nixon) - Nixon was corrupt, but actually did some good (creation of the EPA, for example). Agnew was even more corrupt and self-serving. No.
- Nelson Rockefeller (Ford) - I see no reason to believe that Rockefeller would have been able to achieve anything more than the caretaker Ford did, during a dark period for the country.
- Walter Mondale (Carter) - As @What_Exit says, Carter wasn’t effective; some of that was a product of the times, but some may also have been his lack of experience in national politics. Mondale might have been better in the role.
- GHW Bush (Reagan) - I agree with @What_Exit again. Reagan had charisma, but Bush probably would have been a better administrator.
- Dan Quayle (GHW Bush) - Intellectual lightweight, minimal track record. No.
- Al Gore (Clinton) - had a solid track record in Congress, particularly on tech stuff and the environment. Charisma and inspiration would have been his weak area, compared to Clinton, but at least we wouldn’t have had Whitewater, the Lewinsky Affair, etc. Wash.
- Dick Cheney (GW Bush) - immoral asshole. No.
- Joe Biden (Obama) - he might have gotten more done than Obama, if for no other reason than we wouldn’t have had a significant fraction of the country completely losing their minds over having a Black man as president.
- Mike Pence (Trump) - as @What_Exit notes, would have been somewhat better than TFG, but it’s a really low bar.
- Kamala Harris (Biden) - even with a fractured Congress and electorate, Biden’s gotten things done. I’m not sure that Harris would have been as successful.
It is shocking to me that Charisma wins out over Competence so often.
I can see an argument for most VP candidates since 1960 except for George Bush/Dan Quayle.(spiro Agnew shows where things can go terribly wrong) Ford was an improvement there Even Cheney who was wicked but competent.
Al Gore was more competent than Clinton,Biden was more politically competent than Obama. If only we had chosen Bob Dole/Jack Kemp we would have had conservative ideals but not the crazy ones of today’s Republicans.
I wish I could say it shocks me, but it really doesn’t. People may say they vote (and make other decisions) on a rational basis, but the reality is that they vote for people they find likeable, as well as, in many cases, simply on party loyalty. Understanding which candidate actually is good at doing their jobs requires more thought and research than most people want to put into it.
You skipped over Ford, presumably because he was (at least briefly and under a cloud) in the Oval Office, but he was quite accomplished as a legislator and certainly had far more integrity and less general paranoia than Nixon. Under his term did finalize and sign the SALT II nuclear weapon treaty to limit deployment of strategic weapon systems (although that was started under Nixon), as well as coping with the domestic economic crises about as effectively as anyone could expect. Had he won a full term of his own I think he would have been a pragmatic president in the Eisenhower mold, perhaps avoiding both the morass of Carter and the excessive anti-government campaign of Reagan, but that is obviously all hypothetical as the wing of Republican moderates largely disappeared during the Reagan tenure, presaging the ‘ideological purity test’ of the current GOP.
This is what happens when your electoral process becomes a popularity contest of who can repeat the same patent slogans more times without becoming tongue-tied or having their hair mussed. But this is not a new insight:
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Echoing others in the thread but my first two thoughts go to Pence and then Biden under Obama. Both with giant asterisks.
Pence is obvious of course. As previously pointed out literally anyone other than Trump would have been better for the years of 2016 to 2020. A moldy ham sandwich would have gotten my vote over trump.
And of course if Biden had been president from 2008 to 2016 he wouldn’t have met the level of resistance and racism that has been relit in the country that Obama had to deal with. And yes I know he’s meeting that resistance now, but that’s only because Republicans want to hold him responsible for actually supporting a black man at one point.
He pretty much ran the joint anyway.
I’d rather have had Gore than Clinton. He wasn’t as electable, but if we’re talking magicking the VP into office, sure.
And the biggest problem with W was that he had Cheney as his VP, so that one’s an easy no.
You can pretty much define charisma as the trait that wins out.
Out of the consensus here, Ford vs. Rockefeller is the only one I’d question, and that hinges on a couple of big ifs.
Would a Vice President Rockefeller have pardoned Richard Nixon? Ford has over the years made a pragmatic, if not compelling case for the pardon, so maybe Rockefeller would have done the same.
Would Rockefeller have been a better campaigner in 1976, and thus able to defeat Carter? The election was close as it was, and Rocky was a very charismatic figure. OTOH he was disliked by the rapidly rising conservative faction of the Republicans, If that group had refused to support Rockefeller, Carter would have won anyway, and the point would be moot.
And Rockefeller died before he would have completed the 1976-1980 term, so that raises another entire set of questions.
How much of LBJ’s success hinged on shock after JFK’s death? Did he have any “honeymoon” period? I genuinely don’t know and am curious.
Yeah, that’s an example (and maybe the only obvious one) of a president who might have been significantly better with a different VP.
I’m going to go against the consensus here in that I’m not at all sure Pence would have been a better president than Trump.
I can’t help but think he’d be more effective at getting his goals accomplished – and that’s a scary thought. Whereas Trump doesn’t think much of women(1) except in a sexualized way, Pence actively despises women. Look up “Periods for Pence” to get an idea of where he stands on women’s reproductive freedom.
It’s odd – while Carter and Pence both come across as deeply religious men, Carter’s faith seems to make him a better person, while Pence’s makes him worse.
(1) OK, Trump doesn’t think much, period. (It had to be said.)
Whitewater was largely a manufactured “scandal” designed to discredit a popular middle of the road democratic president (and less popular first lady) . I’m sure that Gore’s past wasn’t so crystal-clear as to make him immune from that sort of thing, if the opposition had thought it was necessary and useful.
Lewinsky was, of course, another matter. But Gore’s attempts at leadership were so uninspiring I doubt if he could have won a 2nd term even with a scandal-free record.
Johnson was a cauldron of boiling energy. He hated being VP. He also hated the Kennedys, who equally hated him. While we’re doing counterfactuals, it’s tempting to propose that he would have stepped down in 1964 because he hit his limit.
When Kennedy was killed, Johnson saw his chance to eclipse what he saw as an inept, do-little presidency and make his mark on history. He certainly had the honeymoon period. The public would have allowed him almost anything. And they voted in the most liberal Congress in decades.
Fortunately for the country, Johnson choose the Great Society and Civil Rights. In 1965:
It began by enacting long-stalled legislation such as Medicare and federal aid to education and then moved into other areas, including high-speed mass transit, rental supplements, truth in packaging, environmental safety legislation, new provisions for mental health facilities, the Teacher Corps, manpower training, the Head Start program, aid to urban mass transit, a demonstration cities program, a housing act that included rental subsidies, and an act for higher education.[8] The Johnson Administration submitted 87 bills to Congress, and Johnson signed 84, or 96%, arguably the most successful legislative agenda in US congressional history.[17]
But pushing through the Civil Rights Act in 1964 (after a 72-day filibuster!) and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 cost him tremendous political capital. The “Solid South” of Democrats began the process of leaving the party for the racist safety of the Republicans.
Johnson’s Vietnam policy boiled down to one element: don’t get embarrassed. He poured in troops to avoid that, which only led to worse results and a growing public backlash. People discuss to this day whether a living Kennedy would have acted differently.
Those two years after Kennedy have no equal in the 20th century except the first two years of FDR. Probably only Johnson and only those circumstances made those possible. And then … the abyss.
I’d agree. The goodwill / honeymoon period lasted at least through the 1964 election, but probably not a whole lot longer than that, for the reasons you state.
You’re not the only one:
Carter was Evangelical but strived to keep his religion from influencing his role as President, and was also an exemplar of ethics, nearly bankrupting himself by divesting control over his family farm while in office. Pence is venal and lacks both moral fiber and a backbone; it was Dan Quayle, of all people, from whom Pence sought counsel and was advised to certify the 2020 Electoral College votes. This is almost certainly the most consequential and closest to ‘heroic’ thing James Danforth Quayle has or will do.
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I will say that Pence’s goals would have been different than Trump’s. Better? No, likely not. But certainly more dignified and “presidential.”
I’m mildly curious how Pence would have handled COVID.
I think you could make a case that Teddy Roosevelt would have been better than William McKinley.
Mike Pence’s goals would have likely been in significant alignment with the White Christian Nationalism movement, and he would have been sufficiently focused on them to make real headway. I’m sure he would have shown decorum as he worked to strip aware rights and protections, giving his actions a patina of respectability.
Trump’s goals were to build ‘Wall’ and win a Twitter was with whatever celebrity or journalist he was currently obsessed with, and he was to scatter-brained and consumed with trying to bully the leaders of strategic allies to accomplish much of anything. As bad as Trump was, he made little progress in pushing the country toward a Margaret Atwood-inspired theocracy aside from appointing highly conservative Supreme Court justices, and while that was bad enough it could have been so much worse if he’d actually been able to follow through on a plan instead of constantly firing and driving off staffers and Cabinet members.
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