Contrary to popular belief, the vice presidency is not a great ticket to the Oval Office. Only 29% of vice presidents have gotten there, and nearly two-thirds of those became president due to the previous president dying or resigning.
A vice president who doesn’t succeed to the presidency due to a death or resignation has about a 1-in-10 chance of actually getting there.
A popular notion on Twitter these days is that Joe Biden, should he win the presidency this fall, will only serve one term and, therefore, whoever he selects as his vice president will have the inside track on the Democratic nomination, and the presidency, in 2024.
We’ll set aside, for a moment, a discussion of the myth that running for the presidency as a sitting vice president gives anyone a leg up. (History shows that most sitting vice presidents don’t even get nominated for the presidency, much less win; only four ever have, and only one of those since 1836. But that’s another topic that I plan to cover as part of another post soon.)
Today’s post will focus on the widely circulated belief that Biden is running purely to get Trump out of office and, due to his advanced age, will not seek a second term if elected this November.
Well, sure. It’s possible. But it’s highly unlikely.
It must be said: we never know what is in a person’s mind unless they tell us. But Biden hasn’t made any such pledge, so his course of action in 2024, if elected in 2020, can only be guessed at. And there are a lot more reasons to guess that he will seek a second term than there are to expect that he won’t.
The truth is that it takes a certain kind of personality to run for president. It’s a huge job that requires an insane amount of striving to get. It also requires a pretty large ego–anybody who really thinks he or she is the best person to hold the most powerful job in the world must have an extremely high opinion of oneself. Anyone who makes it to the White House has generally has spent a significant part of his adult life building toward that moment. For whatever reason, they want the power and the prestige of the presidency, whether for altruistic reasons or for purely egotistical ones.
People who put so much time, and so much of their heart and soul, for so many years, into becoming president are not likely to step away from their lifelong dream voluntarily. It is no coincidence that so many rulers in other, less democratic countries end up staying on for life. Honestly, where do you go, and what do you do, after you have been the head of state of the most powerful country on earth? What can compare? Do you think Bill Clinton doesn’t wake up every day feeling a little bored and thinking wistfully about the job he once held? (Asked in the early 2000s if he would have sought a third term, had it been constitutional, Clinton responded candidly: “I’d have made y’all throw me out.”)
In America, it became customary for presidents to seek no more than two terms due to the example set by President George Washington. Ultimately, after Franklin Roosevelt broke with this tradition by successfully seeking a third term in 1940 (and a fourth in 1944), Congress and the states enacted the 22nd Amendment codifying the two-term limit into law–although it is instructive that Congress quite pointedly did not apply any term limits to itself. Congressmen like power and prestige, too. They might not mind limiting someone else’s terms, but they’ll gladly hang out in Washington for 40 years if they can, thank you very much.
Since the passage of the 22nd Amendment, only two presidents have voluntarily stepped aside while still eligible to run for reelection. Harry Truman, who was not covered by the amendment due to having already been in office when it passed, chose not to run in 1952. But Truman had already served almost two full terms, taking over the presidency just three months into Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth term in 1945 and then winning the presidency in his own right in 1948. Truman may have had the least ambition for the presidency of anyone who has sought the office in the last century, steadfastly resisting the offer of the vice presidency in 1944 until essentially commanded by Roosevelt to accept for the good of the Democratic Party. So perhaps he would have chosen to step aside in 1952 even if his approval ratings hadn’t sunk to 22%. We’ll never know–but remember, he had essentially already served two full terms, and with the Republican Party set to nominate General Dwight Eisenhower, Truman would have had to be remarkably optimistic–or stupid–to expect that he would win.
Lyndon Johnson, in his sixth year in the Oval Office, withdrew from the 1968 presidential race, claiming that the country needed him to focus on the Vietnam War rather than running another campaign. This self-serving statement of martyrdom by an intensely vain, power-hungry man who would have sold his own mother into slavery to be president doesn’t meet the smell test. Johnson was badly wounded by his support of the unpopular war in Vietnam, and shortly after an obscure anti-war senator won 42% against him in the New Hampshire primary–a shocking testament to his political vulnerability that showed the writing was on the wall–Johnson bowed out. But again, he had served about a term and a half.
You’d have to go all the way back to 1880 to find a president who voluntarily stepped away after only one term. That was Rutherford B. Hayes, a mediocre president who had been elected under the most divisive and frankly shady circumstances in the history of U.S. presidential elections. No president in the last 140 years has voluntarily chosen not to run for reelection after just four years in office.
And some presidents hung on to their offices even during severe health crises that made it impossible for them to do their jobs properly, or at all. For all the talk about how Biden will probably forego a second term if he has health issues, consider two examples of how presidents will hang on by their fingernails even during the worst health crises.
EXAMPLE 1: Franklin Roosevelt accepted renomination in 1944 even though he was clearly dying of acute congestive heart failure. He had been ordered by his physician not to work more than four hours a day–an extremely light work schedule for a president in the middle of a world war. His condition was so well-known by key insiders that party elders knew the 1944 Democratic convention was selecting two presidents, not one, as documented in the Truman biography by David McCullough.
One response to this observation is that FDR stayed on because the country needed continuity in wartime, but whether he had stood for reelection or not, it was likely that there would be a change in leadership one way or the other. This is, of course, exactly what happened, as FDR died 82 days into his fourth term, months before the war ended. Whether his doctors told him explicitly of his prognosis is not known, but surely Roosevelt knew his condition was grave, having had a type of seizure shortly before accepting his 1944 renomination by radio linkup.
EXAMPLE 2: President Woodrow Wilson, half his body paralyzed after a pair of strokes and an embolism, actively conspired with his wife Edith to deceive Congress and his own cabinet about the seriousness of his condition. After his devastating second stroke in September 1919, Edith Wilson took on the president’s duties while blocking access to the president to obscure his inability to do his job. His physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, blatantly lied, claiming after the first stroke that the president had taken ill with influenza. The country went on like this for the final 18 months of Wilson’s second term.
Ego-driven leaders who have risen to the height of power simply do not part with that power unless they absolutely have to–due to term limits, losing an election, or impending defeat in an upcoming election. Nobody can read Biden’s mind, or know what he would do if hit with a serious health crisis.
But those who are counting on him to serve only one term, and hoping their own preferred candidate will become the heir apparent in 2024, should learn from history that they shouldn’t count on it.
Returning home to California from a recent business trip in Pittsburgh, I needed some reading material to keep me occupied for several hours of flying, so I picked up “What Happened,” Hillary Clinton’s election postmortem that had been drawing mixed reviews in the media. I was interested to see whether Clinton could shed any insight into how things went so terribly wrong for a campaign that was supposed to be the surest “sure thing” since the Reagan era.
I managed to consume most of the book as my plane traversed the vast swathes of middle America where Clinton had gotten clobbered, where I grew up and lived most of my life, which many of us white-collar coastal types sneeringly refer to as “flyover country.” (A helpful suggestion: my fellow native Midwesterners don’t like that. Stop it.)
As I plunged deeper and deeper into Clinton’s retelling, it struck me that it neatly mirrored the backward-looking party she recently led: stuck in the past, alternately nursing old grievances and happier times, with no useful answer to the most important question of all: What now?
Before I go too far down that path, I should present some important disclaimers. As my regular readers already know, I am a Democrat. I supported Hillary Clinton, both in the primaries and certainly in the general election. I think she would have been a good president. And frankly, I think she got the shaft, particularly from the national political media, which—as Clinton rightly and quite bitterly notes in her book—focused so much attention on an absolutely stupid story (the ridiculous e-mail kerfuffle) as to drown out all other issues. Nobody in American public life since Richard Nixon has gotten the consistently lousy treatment from the media that Hillary Clinton has received for the last 25 years. The difference is that Nixon earned it.
So know going in that my natural inclination is to be sympathetic to Clinton, a fact which in retrospect may have colored my expectations about how the 2016 election would turn out.
That said, her book disappointed me. Although she paid lip service to taking responsibility for her own mistakes, much of the book was an exercise in settling scores: with Donald Trump, with James Comey, with the media, and even with a few individual members of Congress.
When Clinton wasn’t sniping at those who had wronged her—which, in fairness, was completely understandable given the bad treatment she received from them—she spent much of the rest of the book telling tedious anecdotes. It’s nice that she and her staff celebrated birthdays together, but I didn’t buy her book to read all the details about the candles and the cakes.
Sprinkled in amidst all the touching but boring vignettes were the occasional nuggets of gold. For example, Clinton rightly calls out the national political media for focusing on garbage stories—e-mails and the “horse race”—rather than real issues, which is not a new complaint and is certainly a valid one. For what it’s worth, this columnist was as guilty of focusing on the horse race as anyone else, and I have had my share of disquieting moments when I have pondered whether my rosy predictions might have given some readers the mistaken idea that the election was in the bag. I will say this: her assertions that the media played a role, wittingly or not, in elevating Trump to the presidency have real merit, and her takedown of NBC’s Matt Lauer on that score was almost worth the sale price of the book by itself.
And I really did admire the honesty with which she wrote. Whether you agree or disagree with her statements, it is pretty clear that she wrote what she was really thinking and feeling.
On the whole, however, I thought the book fell short. I got the impression that she was still trying to convince people that she was a “normal” and “likeable” human being, but in relating anecdote after anecdote about all the famous elites she knows, this was a hard sell. It read as if she was still trying to fight against the caricature painted of her by her enemies, and I had to wonder why. At this point, to borrow a phrase she herself famously used, “what difference does it make?”
I suppose the thing that lost me the most was it read very much like a book written by someone who is still running. No, I don’t think Hillary Clinton will seek the presidency again, and I certainly hope she doesn’t after losing a slam-dunk race against the least-qualified, most buffoonish major-party nominee to seek the presidency in the history of the republic. That ship has sailed and I expect she understands that.
But in every story about some particular voter she met on the campaign trail, it struck me over and over again that Clinton, in her book, was still campaigning. Maybe it isn’t a habit that is easily broken, but in those moments, it read like the kind of book that candidates write when they are getting ready to run.
In the end, even with her political career clearly over, the key takeaway from “What Happened” is that Hillary Clinton just can’t stop running—not for president this time, but for understanding and vindication. I suppose that’s fine and well, and given what she’s been through, I don’t begrudge her a bit of self-indulgence and self-care.
But if you are looking for answers about what future candidates, or we as citizens, can do differently, you’ll have to infer them on your own. “What Happened,” as its title would suggest, fights the battles of the past, not the future—much like a Democratic Party that is still tearing itself asunder over whether the “Hillary wing” or the “Bernie wing” should inherit the shattered dreams of the glass ceiling that Clinton ultimately couldn’t break. It may be useful to look back, but only if we can apply the lessons of the past to the challenges of the future. Neither Clinton’s book, nor her party—my party—seem prepared to do that just yet.
Since I began writing for the Observer a little over two years ago, I have done very little posting here on my own site. It seemed to me to be superfluous to write here for free when I could get paid for my writing.
However, on occasion, I stumble upon a topic that perhaps is better suited to my blog than for professional publication. And on this Labor Day, I would like to share an experience I had yesterday that seems to be a very appropriate topic for this holiday.
Recently, I moved to a new community in order to be closer to my day job, as my company is moving here in a few weeks, and I wanted to spare myself a dreary 45-minute car commute each way. I have been in the process of getting to know my new neighborhood. Part of that process, naturally, involves finding a good place to get breakfast on a Sunday morning, so I walked over to a little diner not far from my new home and sat at the counter, where a friendly young woman took my order.
The server was engaged in conversation with another customer, a middle-aged, white, male businessman, and she mentioned that when she had left work the previous day, she had forgotten to take her paycheck with her.
The businessman responded: “When you get into the professional world, there is this thing called direct deposit.”
I’m sure he meant nothing untoward by it and was oblivious to the many notions packed into such a statement. For those of us who are tremendously privileged, as he and I are, it is often easy to say things like that without thinking twice about it.
I don’t know the man’s background, but I do know mine. I grew up among union steelworkers, secretaries and servers. And I have never known any of them who are not in “the professional world.” They are engaged in professions for which they get paid; ergo, they are professionals.
But this man’s statement spoke volumes about how those of us in the white-collar world think about those who aren’t. It was dismissive. It carried the idea that if you wait tables, mop floors, drive nails (or paint nails), or do anything that doesn’t involve sitting in an office, you are less than a professional. You are less than.
His statement also carried the weight of the presumption that blue-collar jobs are just a weigh station in life until the “smart ones” find their way into the “professional world.” This is the exact sentiment that fuels opposition to a living minimum wage. “Oh, why should we pay McDonald’s workers $15 an hour? They’re just kids working their way through school.” This, of course, flies in the face of data showing that the average age of a food-service worker is nearly 30 years old.
The young server at the diner yesterday may well be waiting the counter now while she pursues an education that will enable her to enter into a white-collar career. Or she may not. She appeared to be about college age. She almost certainly was not a high-school kid waiting tables on the weekend, because she had an intricate tattoo on her upper arm, and California, like most states, does not allow individuals younger than 18 to be tattooed without parental consent. At any rate, this may or may not be a temporary career endeavor for her. It is possible that she will work this job or another service job for the bulk of her life. And if that is her choice, it deserves better than to be implicitly and thoughtlessly disrespected by someone who looks down his nose at what she does.
A lot has been said and written in recent months about the feeling of alienation that blue-collar people feel in our society. I think that to a great degree, this sentiment has been overused for the purpose of excusing or overlooking the blatant racism and sexism that helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency. That said, the disconnect between the white-collar and blue-collar worlds is palpable, as is the disdain that the former too often holds for the latter.
In America, we too often judge people to be successful based on whether they work with their hands or not. If you’ve gone to college and landed an office job, you are thought to be smart and successful. If not, you are often considered to have failed, or to be stupid. Well let me tell you something: the guy who fixes my car is not stupid. The older woman who cuts my hair has worked hard for years to perfect her craft. The server who keeps multiple orders straight while dealing with her share of difficult customers is quite talented. And the people who build the roads and the bridges and the trains we use to get to our comfortable offices know what they’re doing. They work hard every day to keep this country running. They do vital jobs. But we treat them with tremendous disrespect.
If we want to bridge the chasm between the white-collar world and the much larger blue-collar America—where the overwhelming majority do not earn bachelor’s degrees—it starts with those of us in the white collars respecting every person and every profession equally. If we can’t do that, we shouldn’t be surprised when they manifest their resentment in the most inconvenient places—such as the voting booth.
Over the last quarter of a century, there have been countless allegations and criticisms hurled at Hillary Clinton. Some of them have had merit. Others have been silly. Not a small number have been outlandish. (“She murdered Vince Foster,” for example.)
But by far the most ridiculous criticism ever leveled at Clinton is that she may, on occasion, have said some nasty things about the women who went to bed with her husband. This bit of foolishness is rearing its head again today, as Donald Trump apologists attempt to draw a parallel between his outrageously sexist and porcine statements, revealed this weekend, and how Bill Clinton has behaved with women over the years. Inevitably, Clinton supporters counter that Bill Clinton, unlike Trump, is not running for office, and that Hillary Clinton is not to blame for his behavior. And Trump’s remaining apologists counter, “Yes, but she degraded the women her husband preyed on.”
First, Bill Clinton didn’t prey on anybody, despite Republicans’ repeated insistence over the years that he somehow tricked or pressured impressionable young women into bed. He committed adultery with consenting adults who, like him, should have known better.
Second, and this is an important point, wouldn’t anybody whose spouse cheated have some negative things to say about the person or people he/she cheated with?
Seriously, if you find yourself criticizing Hillary Clinton for voicing a poor opinion of her husband’s mistresses, do yourself and everyone else a favor and just stop talking. You’re being ridiculous.
Don’t be expecting too much from tomorrow’s presidential debate, or any of the debates. We live in a time in which most people already have their minds made up and can’t be swayed by anything. If Donald Trump climbs up on the moderator table, drops his pants and defecates right there, his supporters will cheer.
The country is locked into two ideological camps. People are going to tune in tomorrow night largely to cheer for their side, much like a sports contest. They’ll boo if their candidate gets a tough question, in the same way sports fans boo every call against their own team. Most of the few who don’t tune in to cheer or boo will just be watching to see if a train wreck occurs.
Rah-rahs and gawkers. That’s the American electorate. We have met the enemy, and it is us.
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