THE VICE PRESIDENT IS NO SAFER THAN THE PRESIDENT

…Pence will be paired with the president, no matter what happens to Trump

 

The vice president only has one real duty: that is to wait in the shadows.

 

It was made obvious to Al Gore, when he became vice president, one of his former professors and legendary scholar, Richard Neustadt sent him some sage advice.  One of his important comments was that: “The White House staff lives in the present, the VP’s staff lives in the future.”

 

Mr. Pence, Trump’s vice president needs to understand that other than presiding over the Senate and breaking its ties, the US Constitution gives the vice president only one duty: that is to wait for a horrible or catastrophic “What if moment” as it had happened to Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson when their respective presidents were assassinated.  Or as it was for Gerald Ford when his president was forced to resign from office.

 

But, we are now receiving reports that the current vice president may be doing more than what’s called “active waiting” by making moves to position himself to run if President Trump does not seek reelection.  Or if his term is ended through the efforts of the special counsel, Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

 

It has been a long-time taboo for the vice president to use his small rectangular office in the West Wing for such “future-oriented activities” in a way that interferes with the activities occurring in the oval-office down the hall.

 

Though the vice president’s office has strongly denied that anything like that is occurring, it also has not been disputed that there were trips to Iowa, meetings with major donors and establishment of a political action committee for the VP. In all the noise and hoopla, Pence has been portrayed as being overeager, and he doesn’t sound very sincere when he so vehemently make his denials.

 

As a former chief-of-staff to two vice presidents, Ronald A. Klain stated, “I think this [Pence] knee-jerk reaction to President Trump’s presidency has been misguided in two critical respects.”

 

“First, what Pence is doing is not beyond the pale for an ambitious vice president. While the last two sitting vice presidents to run for president, George H.W. Bush and Al Gore, were a bit more discreet, they nonetheless began politicking with party insiders, donors and early-primary-state muckety-mucks from their earliest days in office. Even during Bill Clinton’s first term, it was hard to find an Iowa county chair, New Hampshire legislator or DNC finance committee member who had not gotten a birthday call from Gore. And Bush’s handwritten notes to political insiders were legendary and ubiquitous.”

 

“Next, it is likewise a mistake to assume any of this will do the vice president any good if Trump’s presidency does collapse. In the 213 years since the 12th Amendment created our system of joint presidential-vice-presidential tickets, no vice president has been elected to the highest office after serving with a president who declined to seek, or was defeated in seeking, a second elected term. And as for coming to office via the president’s ouster, the only vice president to follow that path, Gerald Ford, lost when he campaigned to retain the office, and he had far less to do with President Richard M. Nixon’s scandals than Pence does with the mess around Trump.”

 

There is always strong logic for undertaking such early activity in a president’s tenure. Vice-presidential stroking of party egos spares the president the need to do such basic politicking himself. A vice president operating under the presidential position does build long-term relations and can collect long-term support for his own benefit.  But it also creates political capital that the current administration can leverage in the here and now. Working to boost candidates in midterm elections likewise serves both “present” and “future” agendas. In this way, nothing Pence has been doing on the political front should give Trump any serious heartburn.

 

Based on Mr. Klain’s comments, there is no distance Pence can achieve, no political support he can muster, no congressional dues he can collect, no donor base he can assemble that can survive the fallout of a failed presidency. A vice president will either be implicated as being in the president’s loop or he will look foolish if he insists that he was not part of it. There’s too much video of any vice president praising, promoting and partnering with his boss for him to later say, “President who?”

 

As the VP, you are usually damned….period!

 

A vice president’s record behind the scenes in the administration is usually very obscure to the voters, but with Pence, that is not the case.  Usually, for better or worse, a vice president must run on the president’s record.  Based on Trump’s record so far, (and I don’t mean the false record that Trump continues to brag about) if his record continues to be bad enough to prevent him from running in 2020, it will likely flatten vice president Pence as well.

 

Should Pence seek the presidency in 2020 because Trump has been forced out of office, or pressured not to run for reelection due to his unpopularity, Pence will most likely suffer the same fate as Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Ford in 1976, Walter Mondale in 1984 and Dan Quayle in 2000: that means total defeat.

 

Nothing Pence is doing now will break him out of a political imprisonment of his and apparently Trump’s own creation.

 

From here on, I guess all we need to do is keep our fingers crossed.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017