Appointed President

Jerry Ford's greatest distinction among presidents of the U.S. is that he's the only one to be appointed to the office. (GWB's election was botched, but it was an election.) So far. It's only a matter of time before we get another. That's because we no longer elect vice presidents. They're all appointed.

Ford was appointed under the terms of the 25th Amendment, which was enacted after the assassination of Kennedy pointed out the urgency of always having a spare handy. What if LBJ had croaked before Humphrey was elected VP in 1964? At the time, the idea of simply appointing a replacement (rather than having an actual election) was considered a necessary evil in case of crisis. But today it's just standard operating procedure.

Originally the vice president was selected by as democratic a method as our electoral system could come up with: whoever came in second in the Electoral College vote got the job. The rapid collapse of American politics into a two-party system made that rather awkward, since the two would inevitably be rivals. So they came up with the odd system of a two-person "ticket" where we'd vote for them as a package.

But at least the make-up of that ticket was originally determined by a system with democratic roots: party conventions. Assuming you were a member of a party, you could elect a delegate to represent you at its convention, and that delegate would participate in the process of selecting the party's nominees. It may or may not be a foregone conclusion going into the convention who the presidential nominee would be (like Kerry has a lock on the Democratic nomination now), and that person might have an opinion on the question of who'll be on the ticket with him, but the delegates got to choose. If it was a close contest, the guy with the next-most number of supporters there would probably get the nod. Makes sense.

Today we barely even pretend to do it that way. I'm sure there will be a vote at the Dems' convention, but it'll just be going through the motions. Everybody - including the media, the candidates, political hacks - talk as if the only person who gets to decide who'll be on the ticket with John Kerry is... John Kerry. Which is insane. It's certainly not democratic.

I'm not just picking on Kerry here. I mean, who here (or anywhere) voted for Dick Cheney? Not counting when his name was under Bush's. He wasn't even a candidate for the presidency until GWB pulled him out of the Halliburton boardroom. Joe Lieberman's poor showing this year underscores that he wasn't someone the American public really considered a good choice for president. Dan Quayle obviously wasn't, but he became vice president anyway.

It's telling that the only vice presidents (or candidates) to go on to become presidents (or nearly so) are those who were serious presidential candidates to begin with. Al Gore was a contender in 1992, then (arguably) won in 2000. George H.W. Bush gave Reagan a tough race in 1980, then got elected in 1988. The ones who completely flunked their later presidential attempts or (or never even tried) were the from-off-the-radar-scope appointees: Lieberman, Quayle, Bentsen, Ferraro, Mondale, Agnew, Shriver, Muskie... (OK, Mondale actually got the nomination, but Reagan buried him in the general election.)

I think part of the cause of this phenomenon is the growing irrelevance of the conventions. The TV networks have been grousing that they don't get good ratings, and that's because there's little drama to them, because there's rarely any doubt about the outcome. During the primaries the media treat the contest like a horse race, and in doing so, pretty much assure that someone will "win the race" well before the convention. The voters are too eager to vote for whoever's "ahead".

The sudden replacement of Dean with Kerry as "front runner" demonstrates that. Dean was doing really well in polls all over the country, and a lot of people expressed their intention to vote for him. Mostly because the race announcers described him as being in the lead. When the results from Iowa and New Hampshire didn't ratify that, suddenly Dean's support evaporated and everyone loved Kerry, the surprise winner. It was like 1984 (the book, not the year) with Big Brother telling the public that Oceania was at war with Eurasia now and that we'd never actually been at war with Eastasia.

Combined with the insane cost of running a campaign (which means that most candidates who are "behind" have to withdraw from further primaries), this means that the conventions end up loaded with delegates committed to the inevitable nominee, and they give him a blank check to pick whomever he wants.

I think Nixon made a pretty good choice with Ford. The fact that Tricky Dick had the U.S. Senate to get his appointment past - rather than just a bunch of fawning convention delegates - forced him to pick someone who had the qualities the country needed in a president at that time (integrity and a lack of guile, mostly). Without that, our current process is going to keep on letting presidential nominees appoint our vice president... and in the event of a crisis, our president. The thought of President Cheney scares the willies out of me. And the thought that Kerry could pick someone more for his "running mate" qualities than his qualifications or his popular support for the job of president, doesn't make me feel much better.