Mitt Romney's Veepstakes Mania
Jules Witcover

Aren't you just dying to know who Mitt Romney will pick as his running mate? You would think so, for all the chatter on the television talk shows not only about his choice but also about when he should make it.

Do it now, some say, so he'll have a partner of the campaign trail to cover more territory and raise more money. Don't do it now or before the Republican National Convention, others say, because he'll just give the Democrats another target to shoot at in advance.

Much more important than the timing of Romney's selection is what it will tell about his own sense of public responsibility. The selection of a running mate is the best early window on a presidential nominee's thought process in terms of the policy and the political ramifications of that decision.

Nominees for the presidency always insist they're looking for the individual most qualified to be president if fate so requires. But too often it's a mix of that and political calculation, sometimes much more heavily weighted to the political.

Republican John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin in 2008 was a transparently wild swing for the fences by a nominee in dire straits. Twenty years earlier, the same could have been said of Democrat Walter Mondale's choice of little-known New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro in his long-shot bid against Ronald Reagan.

In between, the 1988 brainstorm of George H.W. Bush in plucking the hapless Dan Quayle out of his hat seemed to make little sense in terms either of policy or politics. After one term, in which Quayle often demonstrated his shortcomings, Bush still stuck with him and lost re-election, though for other reasons.

Over the same last two decades, however, the three winning presidential candidates, Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, have arguably made responsible choices based both on policy and politics, in selecting Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden.

Many no doubt would disagree with Gore's environmental positions, with Cheney's views on the torture of accused terrorists and the extension of presidential power, and with Biden's ideas on how and when to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, all three had resumes of deep governmental experience to support their qualifications.

So it's the substance of the decision on a vice-presidential nomination and not the timing that should concern voters as a presidential nominee goes about his deliberations. Since the 1972 fiasco in which Democrat George McGovern first chose Thomas Eagleton to be vice president and then pushed him off the ticket, fortunately the process of carefully examining prospective veeps has become standard.

In that episode, McGovern waited until the morning after his own nomination to consider his choice, and it was not that Eagleton's background had not been vetted. It was his failure to inform McGovern of previous mental illness that led to his removal and replacement by a truly qualified Democrat in Sen. Edmund Muskie.

In 1968, Republican nominee Richard Nixon waited until his party convention in Miami Beach to unveil his surprise choice of Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew, to incredulous cries of "Spiro Who?" Nixon clairvoyantly explained: "There is a quiet confidence. You look at a man in the eye and you know he's got it -- brains. This guy has got it. If he doesn't, Nixon has made a bum choice." The definitive answer to that gamble came nearly five years later with Agnew's forced resignation for bribe taking.

All this cries out not only for a presidential nominee's great care in choosing his possible successor but also for voters' evaluation of that nominee on the basis of how he has gone about making the selection, on the basis of available information regarding the chosen one.

Certainly, the worst pick was in 1964 when Republican Barry Goldwater named political hack Rep. William E. Miller "because he drives Lyndon Johnson nuts." By that standard, John Boehner would be an obvious pick for Romney. No, Romney should take his sweet time and do the best he can deciding on a man or woman who will be perceived as clearly qualified to be president, if not "best qualified."

 

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Mitt Romney's Veepstakes Mania | Politics

 

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