With President Barack Obama likely facing a tough battle in November, speculation continues to build that hell dump Joe Biden as his running mate and replace him with a more popular Democrat -- namely Hillary Clinton. But history shows that replacing the vice president does little for an incumbent president and some experts are betting that the O and Joe pairing will once again top the Democratic ticket.
One man with inside knowledge on movements to dump the vice president expects a similar campaign against Biden later this year -- but expects Obama to keep his running mate in place. Back in 1992, pointing to the gaffes the vice president had committed, prominent Republicans called on then-President George H.W. Bush to drop Dan Quayle from the Republican ticket and replace him with someone more palatable to the general public, such as Jack Kemp. Despite the pressure, Bush kept Quayle.
Speaking to John Miller at National Review, Quayle thinks that there will be calls to dump Biden but insists that Obama will keep him on the ticket.
There will be a push to drop him, but it wont happen, Quayle told Miller. Why switch? Putting someone else on the ticket wont help. The president must get re-elected on his own. Changing the vice presidential candidate would create too much discord and chaos.
One Republican who wanted Quayle off the ticket in 1992 was former President Gerald Ford. Ford was the last president who tossed aside his vice president and it didn't work out for him. Neither the president, who was appointed vice president by Richard Nixon before taking over the White House in 1974, nor his vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, had been elected to their offices when Ford turned his attention to winning a term in his own right in the 1976 election cycle.
Ford decided Rockefeller, a veteran of New York and national politics who was much more liberal than most Republicans, was a liability, and replaced him with a rising political star from Kansas by the name of Bob Dole. Despite being dumped, Rockefeller helped Ford by delivering New York to the president during his close contest with Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination.
Ford went on to lose to Democrat Jimmy Carter in a close contest that November. Carter carried New York by 4 points over Ford -- enough of a margin to think that Rockefeller, who had carried the Empire State four times in gubernatorial elections, could have helped turned the tide for the Republicans.
While Ford would later muse that removing Rockefeller from the 1976 Republican ticket was one of his chief regrets as president, he urged two later presidents to do the exact same thing. In Write It When I'm Gone, a book of conversations he had with Ford, Thomas M. DeFrank recounts that the former president urged Bush to dump Quayle from the 1992 ticket and later urged George W. Bush to replace Dick Cheney, who had been White House chief of staff under Ford, with either Rudy Giuliani or George Pataki in 2004.
With the exceptions of Ford dumping Rockefeller and FDR replacing John Nance Garner with Henry Wallace -- and then tossing aside Wallace for Harry Truman four years later -- most presidents of the last century seemed content keeping their vice president on the ticket, though there were signs that, had he survived to run again in 1924, Warren G. Harding would have replaced Calvin Coolidge with Charles Dawes (who, ironically, would serve an unhappy stint as Coolidges vice president after Harding died in 1923).
But during the turbulent 19th century, most presidents had no problem tossing aside vice presidents. It may be telling that James Sherman, a New Yorker who served as vice president under William Howard Taft, was the first vice president to be renominated by a national political convention -- and that was back in 1912. But, in the chaotic politics that ranged from the Jacksonian era to the Progressive era, only three presidents won two consecutive terms and only Ulysses S. Grant actually served eight years in a row (the other two presidents who won re-election, Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley, were both assassinated).
In recent decades, the vice presidency has grown in importance. It has certainly become more politically advantageous. When George H.W. Bush won the 1988 presidential election, he was the first sitting vice president to win a presidential election since Martin Van Buren did it back in 1836. Nixon, of course, went from the vice presidency to the White House in 1968 after eight years in the wilderness, beating a sitting vice president to boot in Hubert Humphrey.
After eight years as Bill Clintons understudy, Al Gore came very close to winning the White House in 2000, and Walter Mondale and Humphrey were able to use the vice presidency as a springboard to winning the Democratic presidential nomination. Quayle, on the other hand, didn't even make it to the Iowa caucus when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
Biden is an unlikely choice to continue to build that momentum, but he has launched a few trial balloons that he could be looking at making a presidential bid in 2016. While he would turn 74 a couple of weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Biden has been hitting the campaign trail in key caucus and primary states including Iowa and New Hampshire. Back in early 2011, Biden told Democratic fundraisers to keep him in mind come 2016. Having launched two bids for the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2008, the presidential ambitions could still be burning in Biden.
One state that Biden is keeping his eye on is Florida. Biden was the keynote speaker to the Florida Democratic convention at Walt Disney World back in October and he continues to hit the Sunshine State for Obama. He'll be in Tallahassee to speak at Florida State on Monday.
Despite coming from a small state, Biden did not undermine Obamas chances in 2008 and appears very likely to continue as the presidents understudy. While there are certainly other Democrats looking at 2016 who would love to use the vice presidency as a launching pad, for the moment it looks like Obama has no intention of going against recent history by tossing Biden aside.
Reach Kevin Derby at kderby@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.
