How to use this Page

By Edward Zelinsky

By selecting Representative Paul Ryan as the Republican vice presidential nominee, Romney confirmed the decline of the traditional role of vice presidential candidates as providers of geographic balance. Ryan’s selection reinforces the shift to a more policy-oriented definition of the vice presidency. This shift reflects the nationalization of our culture and politics and the increased importance of the general election debate between vice presidential candidates.

Traditionally, a vice presidential candidate usually came from a large swing state in a section of the country removed from the presidential candidate’s home state. The classic (and most successful) instance of this once conventional pattern was John Kennedy’s selection in 1960 of Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy’s running mate. Johnson was picked to deliver the electoral votes of Texas and other southern states to a ticket headed by a candidate from Massachusetts. It worked.

A generation later, another Democratic presidential nominee from Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, emulated Kennedy by selecting as his vice presidential nominee Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen. This time it didn’t work, but the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket fell well within the tradition of geographic balancing.

The new, policy-oriented pattern commenced in the next election in 1992 when Bill Clinton of Arkansas named as his running mate the senator from next door, Tennessee’s Al Gore. In terms of geographic balance, a Clinton-Gore ticket made no sense — two southerners from neighboring states.

Clinton saw the role of the vice president differently. Gore possessed Washington experience and connections Clinton lacked. Gore thus provided, not geographic balance, but national experience and expertise. This departure from traditional geographic ticket balancing worked for the Democrats both in 1992 and in 1996.

When it was Gore’s turn to choose a running mate in 2000, Gore too departed from tradition, turning to Connecticut’s junior senator, Joe Lieberman. True, Lieberman came from a northern state, Connecticut. But the Nutmeg State, then with eight electoral votes, was not a great electoral prize nor was it in serious doubt for the Democratic ticket. Gore turned to Lieberman because the ethically-challenged image of the Clinton Administration was a problem for Gore. Lieberman’s reputation for ethical probity provided useful ballast to the Democratic ticket.

But it was the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000 which truly broke the geographic balancing mold. Bush did not pick Cheney for the vice presidency to secure Wyoming’s three electoral votes. Rather, the Texas Governor selected Cheney to bring to the ticket Cheney’s perceived gravitas including his experience as Wyoming’s congressman, Secretary of Defense, and White House Chief of Staff.

By 2008, it was no longer innovative when Barack Obama selected Joseph Biden of Delaware as his vice presidential running mate. Biden was not placed on the ticket to secure Delaware’s three electoral votes or otherwise secure geographic balance. Like Gore and Cheney, Biden was perceived as a Washington insider and policy expert. Biden’s experience augmented a ticked headed by a presidential candidate whose tenure in the nation’s capital consisted of a single, not-yet-completed term in the US Senate.

Ryan fits comfortably within the newer, policy-oriented vision of the vice presidency. It doesn’t hurt that Ryan comes from Wisconsin, a state the Republicans are eager to put into play. But unlike some of the other individuals Romney considered for the vice presidential nomination (such as Senator Portman of Ohio or Senator Rubio of Florida), Ryan doesn’t come from a major swing state. Indeed, Ryan himself has never run for statewide office in Wisconsin.

Ryan was picked because he is a young, articulate conservative policy wonk. Romney chose Ryan because of Ryan’s ideas, not Ryan’s home state.

What has caused this evolution of the vice presidency? A key factor is the nationalization of our culture and our politics. Kennedy and Johnson (as well as Dukakis and Bentsen) were individuals deeply rooted in their respective home states. We have become a more mobile nation. Barack Obama (born and raised in Hawaii, educated in California, New York, and Massachusetts) was a senator from Illinois. But his biography is itself a story of geographic balance.

The same is true of Mitt Romney, born and raised in Michigan, educated in California, Utah, and Massachusetts. Romney’s business career occurred in Massachusetts as did his one term as the Bay State’s governor. But no one even expects Romney to carry Massachusetts in November.

Just as the life stories of the presidential candidates are no longer centered in their “home” states, the electorate reflects America’s mobility as a nation. Consequently, geographic ties mean less today than they did in the past; roughly 40% of Americans today live in a different state than the state in which they were born.

Moreover, modern communications instantly nationalize our political figures. Paul Ryan will soon be as well-known in Texas as he is in Wisconsin. In this world of mobility and instant national communications, geographic ticket-balancing is less compelling than it was in the past.

A second factor buttressing the evolution of the vice presidency is the emergence of the vice presidential debates. When Kennedy and Nixon conducted the first presidential debates in 1960, there was no vice presidential debate between Johnson and the Republican nominee, Henry Cabot Lodge.

Today, the vice presidential debate is an important event on the campaign calendar. In picking a running mate, a presidential candidate must consider this event. My son Aaron and his colleagues at the Presidential Debate Blog correctly observe that Senator Bentsen uttered the most famous line in presidential debating: “Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” However, debate skills don’t always correspond with geographic balance. Ryan was in large measure selected because of his ability to go toe-to-toe, rhetorically and intellectually, with Vice President Biden.

We will, no doubt, some day again see a presidential candidate select his or her vice presidential running mate from a large swing state in a section of the country far from the presidential candidate’s home state. But that geographic balancing mold is now longer dominant.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His column ‘EZ Thoughts’ appears on the OUPblog monthly.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only law and politics articles on OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

Image credit: Seal of the Vice President of the United States. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Tweet

By Elvin Lim

In recent memory, there was Al Gore , then it was John Kerry. It was a only a matter of time before President Barack Obama would be compared to the failed Democratic presidential bid of Michael Dukakis in 1988. According to Noemi Emery, Dukakis and Obama are “both creatures of the liberal Northeast and of Harvard, with no sense at all of most of the rest of the country; both rationalists who impose legalistic criteria on emotion-rich subjects; both with fixed ideas of who society’s victims are, which do not accord with the views of the public.”

With the economy still struggling and the President insistently on the unpopular side of the debate about the Ground Zero mosque , Barack Obama has become the newest target of an ancient charge that Democrats are “clueless, condescending, and costly.”

Abraham Lincoln once invited the nation to be guided by “the better angels of our nature.” But when he said those words in 1861, the North was less than inspired and the South was surely unmoved. The nation did eventually come to the right conclusion about slavery by the end of the Civil War but it would take much longer (via the detour called Jim Crow) before we came close to the right conclusion about racial equality.

The civic education of a nation takes time, and Barack Obama should take heed. In a democracy, public opinion is king. And the king should either be obeyed (and this is typically the path of least resistance), or he should be educated (this is leadership). But Barack Obama has done neither. People say he has been too professorial. But maybe he hasn’t been professorial enough.

For after endorsing the idea of the mosque near Ground Zero and resisting the path of least resistance, a day later, the president back-tracked, saying, “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding.” (As Kerry was for the Iraq war before he was against it.) Well done, Polonius.

If Obama was referring to the Declaration of Independence, he should have known (as Lincoln came to know) that even truths which are self-evident must nevertheless be said, resaid, and said again before stubborn majorities come to see the light. Obama should either have deferred to the majority against the idea of the mosque, or tried to convince the majority that their particular sensitivity about the location of the mosque was illegitimate. What he should not have done was perform the unhappy medium: tell people they were wrong but not wrong enough that the President himself would take up the considerable challenge (called leadership) of disabusing stubborn majorities of their ill-conceived conclusions.

If presidents dare tell the American people that they are wrong, then they should also be brave enough to follow through with a thorough explanation. “I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there” is not an explanation. It is an abdication.

Where Gore, Kerry, and now Obama have fallen short is their failure to assume that that which is self-evident to them almost always demands explanation for others. And quite a lot of it, because our better angels have never popped up spontaneously like a burning bush. Ask the abolitionists, and the suffragists (and the best teachers): they of all people knew that intuitions feel utterly right and unassailable until they are brought under the prolonged and penetrating light of reason. We have always fumbled our way toward the right side of history because most of our leaders have bowed to public opinion where