Vice President

4 Key excerpts on "Vice President"

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  Triumphs and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency

  Case Studies in Presidential Leadership

  • Maxmillian Angerholzer III, James Kitfield, Norman Ornstein, Stephen Skowronek, Maxmillian Angerholzer III, James Kitfield, Norman Ornstein, Stephen Skowronek(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The president’s role as party leader, and the temporal extension of campaign seasons, have also enhanced the political value of the vice presidency. The White House must not only concern itself with furthering the administration’s platform, but also with the future electoral success of the party and political allies. Vice Presidents are called on to aid the president in this function. George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, and Al Gore have all been credited for their tireless efforts as political emissaries. Quayle would make a “political trip somewhere around the country at least once or twice a week . . . his job was to touch the dozens of reelection bases that Bush [did] not have time to visit.” It is estimated that these trips to more than 200 cities raised over $20 million for the Republican Party. Similarly, Bush was well equipped to hit the campaign trail while he was Vice President. His previous service as the TRIUMPHS AND TRAGEDIES OF THE MODERN PRESIDENCY 38 Chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973, and his own po- litical ambition, powered his political diplomacy. 24 The Vice President’s performance as a political ambassador serves multiple functions. Vice Presidents often serve as the political attack dogs for the executive branch, exerting influence throughout the political debate. At the same time, they keep the president a safe distance from directly engaging in campaign maneuvers that might seem beneath the dignity of the office. And political ambassadorship serves as a means for Vice Presidents to build their own constituencies for a possible future run at the Oval Office. An unknown Reagan aide was once quoted, “Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have advised my worst enemy to take the Vice-Presidency. It was God’s way of punishing bad campaigners, a sort of political purgatory for the also-rans. Now you’d be crazy not to take the job.” 25 The vice presidency of today is much different than the office disparaged by Thomas Marshall.

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  The Keys to Power

  Managing the Presidency

  • Shirley Anne Warshaw(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The second and third recommendations involved the actual selection process. The commission criticized the selection process for allowing a very quick decision by the presidential candidate on the nomination of a Vice President. The process, they reasoned, should be very carefully and methodically undertaken. Their second recommendation was that at least four weeks prior to the nominating convention the presidential candidate should begin to interview Vice Presidential candidates. Their third recommendation was that the party nominating conventions be changed to have 48 hours between the nomination of the president and the nomination of the Vice President. This would allow the presidential candidate more time to narrow the choice for Vice President and review their compatibility on agenda issues.

  Roles of the Modern Vice President

  The modern Vice President serves in a number of roles, depending on the needs of the president. Since there is no constitutional role for the Vice President with regard to a role in the executive branch, every role that the Vice President plays is a role developed by or encouraged by the president. For presidents and Vice Presidents with strong political and personal ties, the Vice President has played a role as a policy adviser, as did Vice Presidents Mondale, Gore, and Cheney. For most Vice Presidents, their role is limited to ceremonial functions, political assignments, and serving on various task forces and commissions. In cases where there was minimal personal rapport between the president and Vice President, as between Eisenhower and Nixon or between Reagan and Bush, the Vice President was generally relegated to attending state funerals and was regularly sent out of the country for fact-finding missions. Although this was somewhat of a banishment during their tenure as Vice President, the international travels of both Nixon and George H. W. Bush during their vice presidencies allowed them to present themselves during their own presidential campaigns as foreign policy experts.

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  Richard B. Cheney and the Rise of the Imperial Vice Presidency

  • Bruce P. Montgomery(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Vice Presidential activities also had become far more substantial. Not only did Vice Presidents now routinely hold private sessions with presidents, but also attended cabinet and NSC meetings. They received full intelligence briefings and access to presidential information. They lobbied on behalf of administration policies and programs, assumed leadership in the political party second only to the president, and carried out sensitive diplomatic mis- sions. They served as important presidential advisors and liaisons to Con- gress and public interest groups. The office remained a creature of the presidency, however. The position had risen in prestige, assuming newly engrained patterns of responsibilities and becoming more an executive rather than a legislative branch office, but it ultimately relied on the president’s transformative powers to elevate or diminish the office. In the final analysis, the evolution of the office had shown that the vice presidency was what the president wanted it to be. ‘‘The Vice President will be and is what the president wants him to be,’’ Humphrey had said. In a sense, nothing more demonstrated this principle than the vice presi- dency of Richard B. Cheney, who far surpassed his predecessors in power and influence in the administration of George W. Bush. By the time Cheney took office, the vice presidency had certainly assumed greater impor- tance in the operations of the presidency. But Cheney proceeded to make the assertion of sweeping executive powers and the establishment of an imperial vice presidency the hallmarks of the George W. Bush presidency. The dramatic elevation of Vice Presidential authority derived from the presi- dent’s inclination to delegate broad swaths of his presidential powers to his more experience deputy. When he became Vice President, Cheney repeatedly spoke of his agenda of restoring the lost powers of the presidency by rolling back the unwise limits imposed by Congress after Vietnam and Watergate.

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  The White House Staff

  Inside the West Wing and Beyond

  • Bradley H. Patterson(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter nineteen Second Special Counselor: The Vice President The chief embarrassment in discussing his office is, that in explain-ing how little there is to be said about it one has evidently said all there is to say. Woodrow Wilson Whenever possible, the Vice President should serve as general adviser to the president on the full range of presidential issues and concerns. . . . The president [should] assign the Vice President other responsibili-ties that do not conflict with the role of general adviser. Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Vice Presidency W ithin the White House environment, the president’s second and highly valued special counselor can be— and since 1977 has been—the Vice President. Only in the last four presidencies has the Vice President been welcomed into such a principal advi-sory role and been afforded the aides, the facilities, and the access to support it. The Office of the Vice President is thus a significant new center of par-ticipation in White House decisionmaking. The Vice President’s role, of course, has much firmer constitutional under-pinnings than that of the first lady. It is not the Constitution, however, that has assured the Vice President’s place in the decisionmaking process of the White House: it is the personal trust and respect between president and Vice President that are the binding elements. In the words of the Twentieth Cen-tury Fund Task Force on the Vice Presidency, “Each president and Vice President [should] define their working relationship, taking into account 300 their temperaments, experiences, and strengths as well as their views of exec-utive leadership.” 1 That they have done, but the years since 1953 have by now constructed a precedent of expectations—a growing precedent.

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