Vice presidents once were little more than Senate chairs and presidential spares. Then they became presumptive heirs, favored candidates for their party's presidential nomination. George W. Bush broke that pattern by picking a running mate with a great resume but no wish to run eight years later. John McCain and Barack Obama would be wise to do the same.
Originally, the runner-up in the vote for president became vice president, the first two being John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. But in 1804, the rules changed: Vice presidents would be separately elected. By then, political parties had formed. They preempted vice presidential leadership of the Senate and began pairing presidential candidates with far less eminent running mates, chosen for regional balance.
A small role became a black hole. While the president lived, the vice president was not seen or heard except to break rare tie votes in the Senate. In 150 years, only one sitting vice president -- Martin Van Buren -- was elected president, and of the seven who succeeded to the office on the death of a president, only three were later elected, or even nominated.
It was President Eisenhower who amplified the office by making Vice President Richard Nixon an active spokesman, chairman of executive councils, diplomatic stand-in and, in effect, head of government while Ike recovered from a heart attack. All of that helped the young, ambitious Nixon win his party's nomination for president.
The pattern was set. The vice presidential nomination came to be seen as the anointment of an electoral successor.
From 1960 to 2000, four presidents retired and were succeeded by their vice presidents as party nominee. Three other presidents ran for reelection and lost, but their running mates all sought the nomination later, and two got it.
Despite the Bush/Cheney exception, the pattern is now so ingrained that if McCain or Obama puts a plausible electoral successor on the ticket, he will have partly rigged the 2016 election, loading it like a bad pair of dice.
No one is smart enough to choose the best candidate for president eight years in advance. The vice presidency, moreover, while not the black hole it once was, still is no match for gubernatorial, congressional or Cabinet experience as a warm-up for the presidency: Vice presidents do not have to plan or persuade, lead or decide. Besides, a vice president running for president confounds the choice between candidates with a referendum on the outgoing administration. And any anointed successor running for vice president confounds today's presidential choice with another one eight years off.
