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If the race for president has seemed a bit disjointed, it is for a number of good reasons. It's summer. We have been somewhat preoccupied with the Olympics. The candidates are still tentative and finding their ways. And, of course, the conventions are not over.
Senator Barak Obama has just announced his running mate, and John McCain will soon do the same. Then, the battle will be well and truly joined. Perceived as being superficial, naive, inexperienced and with insufficient knowledge of the rough game of international politics, Obama has selected Joe Biden, an old Washington hand, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and proud of his curmudgeonly demeanor. He is many things that Obama wants and needs, and the two get along reasonably well, but he is not Obama's great and close friend. Nevertheless, they will be displayed prominently as such until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. After that, who knows?
Senator John McCain is perceived as having a wealth of understanding about the international arena, but he is roundly criticized as being too old, too addled and having no understanding of domestic politics. One supposes that someone like Barak Obama would be his perfect vice president.
This seems like an awful way to select a leader, trying to balance weaknesses with strengths in an undignified attempt to do (almost?) anything to get elected, but, particularly in modern times, pandering and disingenuousness has defined the business of national politics.
I recall the first televised national political convention in 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower was selected to represent the Republican Party, and I remember being transfixed by the stage-managed hoopla. At the beginning of our participation in the Second World War, Eisenhower was a new brigadier general, a competent but relatively obscure staff officer who was as unlikely to become Supreme Allied Commander as any almost anyone in uniform. Only five years later, he was a five-star general and credited with engineering Allied victory in Europe.
After retirement, he played a great deal of golf and served, largely ceremoniously, as the president of Columbia University. He did not fade into obscurity, but neither was he prominent again until his nomination. He won in a landslide against Adlai Stevenson, beating him again in 1956.
Eisenhower's vice-president was Richard Nixon, and the two made an uncomfortably odd couple. (True, Eisenhower's grandson eventually married Nixon's daughter, but that had more to do with the triumph of love over politics than vice versa). Nixon was chosen because he had proved himself to be strongly anti-communist. It wasn't that Eisenhower was seen to be any friend of Stalin, but in an era when it was domestically expedient to be internationally tough, Eisenhower was insufficiently noisy about it (and inexperienced politically), and Nixon was selected to balance the ticket. This is not much different from the mechanism that gave us McKinley-Roosevelt, Kennedy-Johnson, Bush-Cheney, and now Obama-Biden.
Often, vice presidents seem to have no more utility than a male black widow spider or praying mantis. They exist for one reason only, and after their function is performed, they are ignored, discarded, or worse. One of Franklin Roosevelt's vice presidents, John Nance Garner, likened the office to a pitcher of warm spit. But the prominence of Dick Cheney in this administration has, at least for this election, changed the importance of a strong vice president who serves an inexperienced boss.
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Thanks. As much as an extremist as I am---and as we all tend to be on some subjects, especially as we get older---I find it useful to cut to basics, something we all learned as brand new soldiers.
