{"id":5070,"date":"2009-11-25T10:34:53","date_gmt":"2009-11-25T17:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=5070"},"modified":"2009-11-25T12:19:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-25T19:19:00","slug":"worst-vice-presidential-picks-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2009\/11\/25\/worst-vice-presidential-picks-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"Worst vice presidential picks, redux."},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a pretty good reinvention of the old “Worst Presidential Picks” list <\/a>— looking beyond capturing what the selections mean in their purely electoral terms and picturing the vice presidents in the role as Emergency President.\u00c2\u00a0 Which asks one to leave aside your Dan Quayle huntings — not necessarily a good president, just not the disaster you would imagine, and leave aside your Eagleton — even if he completely sunk McGovern, he would not have been a bad president.\u00c2\u00a0 And so we get Eisenhower’s selection of Richard Nixon — and the thought of a President Nixon at the juncture of the decade of McCarthy.\u00c2\u00a0 This is a compelling argument, but I would have to think about it.\u00c2\u00a0 And we get the prospect of a President Henry Wallace — which I gather might just have resulted in a Military Coup.<\/p>\n

But, if we’ve gotten to those perimeters — if we’re considering 1940, I feel free to throw in Adlai Stevenson’s slection of Sparkman — if only because I once witnessed Pat Buchanan argure about the racial politics of the present day by going back to 1952.\u00c2\u00a0 Then again, we could also go back to the gamut of near corpses selected here and there throughout history — didn’t Alton Parker select some guy just out of the theory that he’d fill the party coffers?<\/p>\n

It is there that the comments section pulls the rug under this contraption.\u00c2\u00a0 Throw out the name Aaron Burr.\u00c2\u00a0 Throw out the name Andrew Johnson.\u00c2\u00a0 In Johnson’s defense, there was no way out in that political environment — anyone at that juncture is doomed to failure.<\/p>\n

Other possibilities, from that vantage point: John Tyler.\u00c2\u00a0 For the sake of formulating a model of a Whig Presidency to counter-act the dominant Democratic Party, after the first elected Whig Party candidate passes off one month in, a certified Democrat was not at all useful.\u00c2\u00a0 See also Millard Fillmore, to a lesser degree.\u00c2\u00a0 In a way, we may just well view Joseph Lieberman from the same perspective.<\/p>\n

Actually, this kind is a pathetic list.\u00c2\u00a0 It leaves out the nineteenth century, and the first third of the twentieth.\u00c2\u00a0 After some deliberation, I would say the worst vice presidential selection was the Great Nullifier — John Calhourn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a pretty good reinvention of the old “Worst Presidential Picks” list — looking beyond capturing what the selections mean in their purely electoral terms and picturing the vice presidents in the role as Emergency President.\u00c2\u00a0 Which asks one to leave aside your Dan Quayle huntings — not necessarily a good president, just not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5070"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5073,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5070\/revisions\/5073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}