How the Vice Presidency Could Save the Republic (But Probably Won't)

by Jeremy Lott

When they look at the choices in this year's presidential elections, many libertarians and old-school conservatives are understandably irate.

Both Democrats promise to bring the troops home from Iraq -- eventually -- but the real issue at this point is future commitments. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are liberal interventionists. At best they would commit the country to a series of smaller wars, like we saw in the 1990s (think Kosovo); at worst we'd have Woodrow Wilson or LBJ (peace candidates, both) all over again.

And any gains from a less belligerent foreign policy abroad must be weighed against the Democrats' more belligerent domestic policies. A Democratic Congress and president will allow President Bush's tax cuts to expire. They will give new powers to labor unions and enact more restrictive environmental regulations. Socialized medicine, here we come.

GOP nominee Senator John McCain is not much better domestically. The Republican will run on a fairly conservative platform but he is a regulator at heart. On his watch, the best that can be said is that the Democratic domestic agenda will progress more slowly. Taxes won't be raised as much and government will expand its control over medicine but stop short of a total takeover. Don't even get me started on campaign finance reform.

McCain might be worth rolling the dice on, since the lesser of two evils is less evil, but then we come to his foreign policy, which is lunatic. He doesn't mind if America stays bogged down in Iraq for the foreseeable future. He wants a bigger military and more wars. ("Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," he sang on the campaign trail.) These wars will cost money, which will more than erase any savings he secures through a judicious use of the veto pen.

The bottom line is that however the election turns out in November, America is likely to be in worse shape a year from now than it is today. Under George W. Bush. Savor the bitter day-old-coffee flavored irony.

There is, however, one sliver of hope. Though I hasten to repeat, it's only a sliver. My new book is "The Warm Bucket Brigade." I started out to write a history of a quirky institution known as the American vice presidency, but it ended up being a history of the unexpected and unforeseeable, and also the vastly underestimated.

Take a guess: How many vice presidents went on to become president? Seriously, take a guess.

The answer is 14. That means almost one third of our president started as the nation's number two. Eight of them became president directly when the president died or was driven from office.

Vice presidents often changed the direction of the country, since they were put on the ticket not to continue the president's program in his stead but, usually, to bring some sort of regional or ideological balance to the ticket.

Whig William Henry Harrison died but a month into his term. The powers-that-be fought with veep John Tyler and drummed him out of the party. Abraham Lincoln's second vice president Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat added to the ticket as an olive branch, was hated by radical Republicans. They impeached him over his firing of a cabinet secretary. The Senate fell only one vote short of removal.

To bring this back to 2008, nominees of both parties are likely going to have to pick running mates well to the right of them. McCain has to make up with conservatives, who distrust him. And Clinton or Obama will want to make McCain fight for a region that the Republicans should otherwise have in the bag: the South.

So, let's say that McCain picks Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn and the Democratic nominee picks Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen. There are certainly good cases to be made for both. Oklahoma was the one Southern(ish) state that McCain won comfortably on Super Tuesday, thanks largely to Coburn's endorsement. Bredesen is a popular Southern governor from a state that could swing to the Democrats.

Let's further stipulate that after the election is settled, something happens. (And don't read too much into that: I'm not predicting assassination or untimely death, here; I'm predicting unpredictability.) And the upshot is that we end up with a President Coburn or President Bredesen.

Here's why that could end up being awesome:

Coburn is not just a fiscal conservative; he's an anti-pork fanatic who once complained that his Senate colleagues had "reproductive organs the size of B-Bs that won't allow them to do the right thing." He's a medical doctor who understands that the problem with the American healthcare system is not too little government meddling but too much. He's also rumored to be a skeptic of getting into a tangle with Iran.

Bredesen, for his part, is a conservative Democratic governor who managed to get a B on the most recent Cato Report Card. According to Cato, Bredesen made a killing in the health care industry. As governor, he made some progress restraining costs in his state's subsidized healthcare subsidy TennCare, including "remov[ing] all non-Medicaid-eligible adults and put[ting] strict limits on prescription drugs and doctor visits." According to the Cato report, "[H]e can brag about keeping Tennessee in the ranks of the lowest-taxed states in the nation."

Bredesen would be running on a ticket that makes the well-nigh-impossible-to-wiggle-out-of promise to get us out of Iraq. If he unexpectedly became president, he would likely want to see the withdrawal through quickly so that he could get on with what could end up being an almost tolerable administration.

Is all of this unlikely? Of course. But not impossible. As that wise political philosopher Han Solo once said, "Never tell me the odds." After all, we do know that one President Clinton has already picked a running mate from Tennessee. We also know that John McCain gets along with Coburn well because of their cussedness and shared hatred of pork barrel spending.

Here's hoping. If anything can save the Republic over these next four years, it's that most unexpected and underappreciated of institutions, the vice presidency.

Jeremy Lott is author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency. Order it here.