Vice Presidents -- not just "buckets of warm spit"

Kevin Drum has a pretty fascinating post about recent Vice Presidents of the United States. It's a good thought to keep in mind, as Democrats like myself watch John Kerry mull over a running mate: to a large extent, a Vice Presidential pick can steer a great deal of a party's future. The best example, to my mind, in recent decades is when Ronald Reagan chose George H.W. Bush in 1980 (after briefly considering former President Gerald Ford for the post). Had that ticket failed, or had GHWB then lost in 1988 to Michael Dukakis, I very much doubt that come 1994 the name "George W. Bush" would have been all that enticing to the Texas Republican party as it looked for someone to run against then-Governor Ann Richards. Reagan's often thought of as the paragon figure of contemporary Republican ideology, but in a real way he also managed to create the dominant contemporary political dynasty in the Bush family.

This also casts a bit of aspersion, not unfairly, in the more common use of Vice Presidential picks to shore up certain areas in which the Presidential nominees see their own credentials as being a bit lacking. As much as many on the right, if not all, admire Dick Cheney, it's frankly very hard to see him as any kind of "future of the Republican Party"; likewise, as a Democrat knowing what I now know about Joe Lieberman, I'm glad I am not faced with the likelihood of him heading up the Democratic ticket in 2008. And for right now, there's yet another reason why I hope that when the final list of names is drawn up in the Kerry HQ, the name "Richard Gephardt" has a big, fat black line drawn through it.