calimac

The topic on last week's vice-presidential debate (full transcript) that seriously interested me technically was the role of the vice-president. Not surprisingly, Biden - who's known every vice-president since Humphrey - grasped a lot more about the office than Palin - who may well never have met a vice-president at all. (If she's met Cheney, a cursory search didn't show up any evidence of it.)

Palin has been justly criticized for endorsing Cheney's view that the VP is part of both the executive and legislative branches, the bizarreness of which shows in the ad hoc reason it was propounded, to claim he was exempt from both normal Congressional review of executive branch activities and Congressional oversight of its own branch. Neat trick, eh? You'd think the logical conclusion would be that it'd be subject to both forms of oversight.

Palin puts it as that there's "a lot of flexibility" in the office of VP, and claims that the Founding Fathers had this is mind. They certainly did not. Ambiguity, at most, is what they had in mind. That what she has in mind is something looming and Cheneyesque comes out in when she is "thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it." Which rather suggests that pre-Cheney VPs were simply ignorant of the vast power they could have had at that their disposal. Alexander Throttlebottom, master of the universe!

Nonsense, of course. In fact the VP's power - with the one exception of the ability to break tie votes in the Senate - is purely of executive origin and consists of whatever power the President chooses to grant. Palin claimed that she'd been joking when she'd said that someone would need to explain to her what the VP does every day, but it was actually a good point. The Constitutional responsibilities of the post do not form a day-to-day job description. VPs do not spend all their time presiding over the Senate, and what she'd do as VP is whatever McCain defined the job as being. It's entirely up to the President.

For most of our history, VP candidates were chosen as ticket-balancers, to propitiate some party wing or machine that lost out on the nomination. Thus they were usually not committed to their President's agenda, and that's why the Presidents left them out in the cold. Since WW2 the role of the VP as the Emergency Backup President has gained favor, and consequently work has been found for them. But Cheney's power is still unprecedented in VP history. It comes simply from Bush's unprecedented view of the job as a hands-on COO to his own hands-off CEO. When Gerald Ford suggested in an interview that if he became Reagan's VP he'd be a kind of "co-president", Reagan's response was to drop him from consideration. "Co-president" is rather Cheney's job, but Reagan unlike GWB didn't want one.

Biden displayed a keen understanding of what the best recent VPs have been employed doing: as free-floating advisers. "Every major decision he'll be making, I'll be sitting in the room to give my best advice ... [as] someone who had an independent judgment and wouldn't be afraid to tell him if he disagreed." This is how Carter employed Mondale, how Clinton employed Gore, and (as far as we know) how Reagan employed Poppy Bush. In each case a President with little Washington experience had a VP who was an old hand, and this is obviously what Obama sees in Biden. That Obama, who has more Washington experience than any of these Presidents, still wants a VP like theirs, speaks well of his willingness to learn from others.

Biden showed even more wisdom in turning down a topic portfolio. VPs have occasionally had these. It doesn't work. It puts the VP on a level with cabinet secretaries and other department heads, squabbling with them for attention and money and undercutting what ought to be the VP's unique standing with the President. Palin, on the other hand, has some topics picked out for her by McCain. That's not necessarily disastrous, if he intends for her to talk about them in public, helping to push his general agenda, rather than having her supervise an office with a plan and a budget.

But probably not. Supervising is what executives do, and here was Palin talking about her executive experience again. (And incidentally employing her weirdest grammatical tick, casting the antecedent of a sentence as its consequent: "It is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P.")

She's particularly mistaken if she thinks that being President of the Senate gives the VP any sort of executive authority there. Even Cheney hasn't tried that, apart from cursing out occasional senators who won't do what they're told. But apparently she does: the authority she says the VP possesses to exert is "in working with the Senate." Again Biden knows better. He got his words a little mangled - Article I is the legislative branch, but it is the one he was talking about - but his point was clear: "The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is ... when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress." That is true. Presiding over the Senate, the VP acts only as a neutral officer enforcing the rules, which the Senate writes itself. The President of the Senate recognizes speakers and announces rulings, but never gives speeches of opinion. Voting to break a tie is the only time VPs can exert their own authority, express their own views.

Working with the Senate is the trickiest part of the VP's job, and the one at which the most fail. The Senate is very conscious of its own prerogatives, and any VP who thinks it's his job to tell senators what the President wants will get a very cold shoulder. (This is what happened to Spiro Agnew.) Biden says he "would be the point person for the legislative initiatives." This is a challenge. But he's been a senator, he's negotiated with senators, he knows how they want to be approached.

Also, presiding over the Senate is a complex job requiring both diplomacy and a mastery of the rules. So many VPs have done so conspicuously badly at this (notably Rockefeller, and before him Calvin Coolidge and Charles Dawes, among others) that they rarely do it any more, except for ceremonial occasions and when tie votes are expected.

But with sufficient tact, a VP can act as a neutral channel of communication, and become liked and respected by the Senate. John Garner, Alben Barkley, and even Richard Nixon as VP succeeded at this. There is a pattern here. For the most part, a VP successful in dealing with the Senate is one who has personally served in Congress, and ones who have not served in Congress are not successful.

(There are exceptions: LBJ as VP had trouble with the Senate because it had long wanted out from under his thumb, though he recovered his touch as President; and Cheney, forgetting his House service, reverted to his previous incarnation as an executive branch heavy. On the other side, Thomas Marshall, though never in Congress, got along well with the Senate as VP because he was so friendly and easy-going, and because he never tried actually to do anything.)

But the exceptions are few. Palin has never been anywhere near Congress; she never even served in her state legislature. As VP she'd probably walk into the Senate and, with that big heap of "executive experience" tied to the top of her head, try to tell them what to do, the same way as Governor she's tried to tell her legislature what to do. Like Agnew, she'd be in for a big surprise. Maybe that's what Biden was explaining to her as they were talking so intently after the end of the debate.