It might be too early to be speculating on vice presidential options for Republican and Democratic tickets. But, then, since when is anything off the political table in pundit world, where you always need grist for the scenario mill?
That said, here’s hoping the vice presidential choices reflect more than ticket-balancing acts.
Recently Scott Gottlieb, MD, a former senior advisor for the Food and Drug Administration, pointed out in the Tribune that with presidential front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton approaching 70, it would be wise to be mindful of their health. Dr. Gottlieb, hardly an alarmist, acknowledged that none of the leading candidates have “a medical profile that should impair their fitness for the office or slow them down.” So his was a prudent, cautionary reminder about those seeking the demanding, uber stressful position of president and commander-in-chief of the United States. But worth noting.
It also means that the vice presidential candidates must be capable of stepping up and taking over the world’s most formidable job. The most politically advantageous demographic is not criterion enough.
This is 2016, the existential threats can be from afar as well as within. Who carries the nuclear codes, who orders young Americans into harm’s way, who nominates Supreme Court justices and who makes the tough domestic calls–from the economy to health care–are a president’s purview. But they fall to a vice president should the president be incapacitated or die.
This is not the era of Woodrow Wilson, a second-term stroke victim who passed on the powers of the presidency to his wife Edith–and not Vice President Thomas Marshall. Franklin D. Roosevelt never deigned to keep Harry Truman in the loop, and Lyndon Johnson was an insider joke until he assumed the presidency of the assassinated John F. Kennedy. As it turned out, unelected successors made history-altering calls on the atomic bomb and Vietnam escalation.
The vice presidency matters–and its occupant is literally that well-referenced heartbeat away from the presidency. When the president is a septuagenarian, it matters a bit more.
Put it this way: Imagine a President Sarah Palin in a worst-case scenario during a John McCain administration.
Our focus, understandably, will be on the two nominees. But their running mates must be much more than paeans to personality and demographics.