In American mythology not much is left to the imagination. That’s certainly the case in presidential politics, about which a rich tapestry has been woven since George Washington took the job with John Adams as his deputy. Adams succeeded Washington after his two terms to become one of America’s better presidents.
Is the office of vice-president “not worth a pitcher of warm spit,” to misquote John “Cactus Jack” Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president from 1933 to 1940? (Garner actually said “warm piss.”) The answer to that question depends on the individuals involved, their relationship to each other and their circumstances.
Recent history provides a mixed picture of relations between president and vice-president. Dick Cheney pushed George W. Bush towards a disastrous war in Iraq. Mike Pence failed to rein in Donald Trump’s worst tendencies, of which there were many, until the very last moment. Joe Biden served effectively, if uninspiringly, as Barack Obama’s vice-president.
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate represents a doubling down on progressivism in an election year like few others. Although he’s from a midwest state, Walz reflects Harris’s own west-coast liberalism. Whether this combination will be regarded as too progressive for a mainstream American voting public remains to be seen.
But it’s reasonable to ask whether Harris’s candidacy would have been better served by making a more conservative choice — Josh Shapiro, for example, governor of Pennsylvania, a state whose nineteen electoral college votes are balanced on a knife edge. Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania to Trump in 2016; Joe Biden got his birth state back in 2020 by a slim 1.2 point majority.
The Trump campaign has wasted no time in zeroing in on Walz’s perceived progressivism. During his two terms as governor he has enshrined abortion rights in state law, expanded background checks for gun purchases, set paid medical and family leave requirements for employees and legalised recreational marijuana.
By any American standards, this is a progressive agenda, contrasting starkly with Trump’s calculating embrace of his conservative Make America Great Again base. If the rule of thumb in running-mate selections is to go for someone who “does no harm” and may even “do some good,” Harris’s selection of the relatively unknown Walz seems both risky and calculated: risky for the obvious reasons, calculated because Walz has proved himself an effective campaigner in a long congressional career — twelve years representing a semi-rural district he won from a Republican — and as governor. Given that an important role of vice-president is to liaise with a fractious Congress, his service in Washington no doubt contrasted favourably with alternative candidates.
Walz might be regarded as the meat-and-potatoes choice with his knockabout manner, background as a school-teacher, football coach, national guardsman and elected representative. He also happens to be a good communicator.
Despite their shared small town roots, he presents a definitive contrast to Republican nominee J.D. Vance. Walz was born in small-town Nebraska, Vance in a smallish town in Ohio, but there similarities end. No doubt weighing in Harris’s choice will have been the contrast between Walz’s ordinariness and what Walz himself has described as the “weirdness” of the Republican ticket.
Leaving aside his likening of Trump to Hitler, Vance’s apocalyptic views about childless women make him a problematical running mate for a problematical candidate. He is proving to be the political gift that keeps on giving for the Democrats, with more of his outlandish views surfacing by the day — to the point where the muttering about his suitability as a candidate among some of those around Trump has become audible.
In her choice of Walz over Shapiro, Harris will avoid Israel–Palestine ructions at the 19–22 August Democratic convention in Chicago. The Democratic Party’s progressive pro-Palestinian left has been agitating against Shapiro on account of his perceived support for the Gaza war, despite his having described Benjamin Netanyahu as “one of the worst Israeli leaders of all time.”
By choosing Walz, Harris will probably get what she wants in Chicago, which is a unified party ready to take the fight to Trump and Vance and in the process protect the “blue wall” among Democratic voting states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Minnesota, with its ten electoral college votes, is a reliable “blue wall” component.
Walz would be expected to campaign well across the midwest. His connection with the Democratic base, particularly the union movement, should complement Harris’s geographical distance from this segment of the American voting public.
Harris’s choice of Walz mirrors the selection of another Minnesotan as a vice-presidential candidate. In 1976, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter chose Walter Mondale to be his running mate. Mondale, who died in 2021, shared Walz’s small-town roots and progressive politics.
Hubert Humphrey, who served as Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president, was another Minnesotan to make his mark on the national stage. Humphrey, Mondale’s mentor, was no doubt something of an inspiration for the Democratic Party in which Walz came of age politically.
Inevitably, discussion about vice-presidential choices prompts debate about the good, the bad and the ugly in a multi-textured history of an office that is a heartbeat away from the most powerful in the world.
Or a gunshot: on four separate occasions, vice-presidents have graduated to the presidency after presidents were shot. Andrew Johnson became president after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. Chester Arthur succeeded the assassinated James Garfield in 1881. Theodore Roosevelt became president when William McKinley was killed in 1901. And Lyndon Johnson succeeded John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.
On another three occasion vice-presidents have been elevated to the Oval Office after the incumbents died of natural causes: John Tyler in 1841 after William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia just a month after assuming office; Calvin Coolidge in 1923 after Warren Harding died of a heart attack; and Harry Truman in 1945 after a debilitated Franklin Roosevelt died in office.
In just one case, in 1974, a vice-president, Gerald Ford, replaced a president, Richard Nixon, who had been forced to resign rather than be impeached, namely over the Watergate scandal. Ford had replaced Spiro Agnew in 1973 after the latter pleaded guilty to tax evasion.
On the law of averages, a vice-president has a one-in-five chance of succeeding to the presidency through some mishap or other. One commodity America is not short of is “presidential historians” — and “vice-presidential historians,” for that matter. This is rich territory for academics.
At times like this newspapers are prone to poll these historians on their view of the best and worst vice-presidents. The Los Angeles Times has found that among the highest-rated were Al Gore to Bill Clinton (1993–2001). Joe Biden to Barack Obama (2009–17) and Lyndon Johnson to John F. Kennedy (1961–63). Spiro Agnew to Richard Nixon (1969–74) brought up the rear.
Kamala Harris rated a lowly eleven out of eighteen in the poll taken before Biden stepped aside. Mondale is rated fifth in a presidency, Jimmy Carter’s, that wasn’t regarded highly at the time but has drawn more favourable reviews latterly.
John Nance Garner isn’t the only figure to have disparaged the office over the years. In conversation with his formidable wife Abigail Adams during his incumbency, John Adams complained that “my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
Theodore Roosevelt, president on William McKinley’s death, once observed the office was “not a stepping stone to anything except oblivion.” In his own case, he was proved spectacularly wrong.
Garner himself, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president throughout his first two terms, was surely one of the more colourful figures in American political history. Among his various contributions to American political lore was his observation of Roosevelt: “The senior member does all the talking. I do all the work.”
When he challenged Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in 1940 and was rebuffed by his party, Garner retired to his ranch on the Texas border with Mexico vowing never to cross the Potomac again. And he never did, having served as both a congressman, congressional leader and vice-president over a career of almost forty years.
Whatever contributions Tim Walz makes to the American political lexicon he will be stretching his small town vocabulary to match that of Garner; although it is fair to say he has made a start. His observation about the “weirdness” of the Republican ticket has become a staple of the Democratic campaign. •
