Second-Guessing The No. 2 Spot

Indeed, the vice president appears to be a side effect of other considerations. Going back to our original architectural metaphor: The veep is what architects would call a spandrel. He's there because other things need to be there. Madison records one delegate opining, "He was introduced only for the sake of a valuable mode of election which required two to be chosen at the same time."

This part of the genesis of the vice presidency can be hard to follow. The Framers never for a moment thought the president needed a Mondale-like adviser or a Cheney-like super-deputy. Their main concern was that they wanted electors from the states to be forced to vote for two people, and not from the same state. The reasoning, historians surmise, is that states would habitually throw their support behind a favorite son as the presidential candidate. Virginians would vote for a Virginian, New Yorkers for a New Yorker, etc. But if they had to cast a second ballot, that second choice, under the Constitution, couldn't be another favorite son.

Follow this logic to its conclusion: The Framers were thinking that the No. 2 pick of many of the electors would be a nationally recognized figure who would wind up with more votes, total, than any of the No. 1 picks. It's kind of like they wanted the vice president to be president.

But chaos ensued. The Framers failed to anticipate the rise of powerful political parties. The first fiasco happened in 1796, when John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson. Since Jefferson had the second most electoral votes, he became Adams's vice president -- even though they were from rival political parties.

Then came the disaster of 1800. Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, wound up with the same number of electoral votes. Because electors didn't distinguish between a "presidential" vote and a "vice presidential" vote, the election was thrown to the House, which was controlled by the Federalists. Burr, a notorious scoundrel, may have quietly lobbied for the top job; Jefferson had to cut a backroom deal or two. Finally, after many weeks and 36 ballots, the House finally voted to give Jefferson the job he'd rightly won in the election.

The episode demanded a Constitutional fix, the 12th Amendment, and in the process there was some consideration of putting the kibosh on the vice presidency altogether. The veep played a role in two more amendments dealing with elections and successions, the 20th and 25th.

One day we'll get it exactly right.

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The job has served as a portal into the highest level of government of an interesting assortment of people. Some were brilliant; some were useless. Theodore Roosevelt came in through the veep hole, but so did Spiro Agnew. Call it the Roosevelt-Agnew Spectrum. Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore, while Agnew is mostly remembered for resigning during a bribery scandal and calling the press corps "nattering nabobs of negativism."

History shows that Richard Nixon, in the summer of 1968, picked Agnew with minimal vetting. In his memoir "RN," Nixon wrote that Agnew seemed dignified and moderate and that he might help with the states bordering the South. Nixon first offered the job to two no-name cronies. His account is very offhand and reveals that, as late as 1968, the vice presidency was an afterthought. Agnew quickly made a fool of himself, calling one reporter a "fat Jap" and referring to Polish Americans as "Polacks."

Goldstein, the veep scholar, votes for Agnew as the worst of the lot. But there have been others who do not tower over the historical landscape. It seems likely that J. Danforth Quayle is doomed to have an obituary that will mention in the first few paragraphs that he couldn't spell the name of a common root vegetable. And there was Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's No. 2, whose rambling inaugural speech convinced listeners that he was completely sloshed.

Some vice presidents manage to surprise the skeptics. Many felt Harry Truman wasn't up to the job when he assumed the presidency upon the death of FDR in the closing months of World War II. He hadn't been in the loop. He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project. "Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman only saw each other twice during the 83 days they were in office together," reports historian Roger Porter of Harvard. But after taking some time to get his footing, Truman did just fine.