Let's change the way we choose the vice president

Hillary Clinton gave a political speech in Pennsylvania last weekend, which, in case you missed the coverage, pretty much locked up the 2016 nomination. Don't be surprised if they hold the Democratic convention over Skype sometime this month, just to dispense with the tiresome formalities of an actual campaign. Maybe they'll throw in the 2020 nomination, too, while they've got everyone on the line.

I've written many times now that I'm less convinced of Clinton's inevitability than, you know, everybody. But leaving that aside for the moment, assuming she runs, the talk in Washington is about to pivot to the question of who runs with her. The elbowing for second position has already begun with a series of high-profile endorsements, most recently by Joaquin Castro, the Texas congressman whose brother, Julian, is considered a vice presidential contender.

And this has me thinking about a conversation I had recently with Bob Bauer, the former counsel for President Obama and one of the best legal minds in Washington. Bauer thinks there's something outdated and dangerously wrong with the way we select our vice presidents. And you know what? He's right.

If you paid attention in civics class, you will remember that nominees didn't always pick their running mates. For the first few presidential elections after the country was founded, the office was assigned to the runner up in the presidential election, until it became apparent that having presidents and vice presidents from dueling parties was a certain path to partisan dysfunction — not at all like the ennobling and highly efficient system we know today.

For a long time after that, the parties chose presidential and vice presidential nominees by separate ballots, having nothing to do with one another. We were well into the 20th century before presidential candidates, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, started hand picking their understudies and asking their parties to sign off.

From then on, the vice presidency evolved into an anomalous contradiction in a country that prides itself in coming as close to Athenian democracy as anyone since the Athenians. Our second-highest elected official, next in line for the presidency, is essentially deeded the office by another politician.

This led to some awkward transitions of power in the last century, the most disconcerting of which involved the Nixon administration. Nixon's first vice president, Spiro Agnew, had to resign early in his second term after it was revealed he had taken bribes during his time as Maryland's governor. His replacement, Gerald Ford, assumed the Oval Office after Nixon himself was consumed in scandal.

Thus did the country somehow end up with a president elected by no one but the voters in a single congressional district in Michigan, along with a vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, elected only by the people of New York and approved by Congress. That's not a scenario heartening to anyone who believes in the ideal of representative democracy, whether one thinks Ford was up to the job or not.

Now comes Bauer, a pioneer in modern election law who has been thinking hard these past few years about reform generally. Bauer and his respected Republican counterpart, Ben Ginsberg, recently led a commission charged with updating the democracy, mainly by figuring out how to fix this bizarre patchwork of polling places and voting machines.

And it occurred to Bauer that somehow our notion of democratic reform always ignored the oddity of the vice presidency. "We talk about money and the voting processes and all of that, and these are legitimate issues about the responsibility and accountability of the political process," he told me. "But it does seem to me that this is a glaring hole."

Bauer, I note again, is a Democrat, and he loses no sleep over the office's current occupant; he's a Joe Biden fan. His fears, as you might expect, stem from watching another recent vice president, Dick Cheney, and an even more recent nominee, Sarah Palin. Both of them, he contends, embody important changes in the nature of the vice presidency in recent years.

The first is that the modern vice president, beginning really with Al Gore, has a very different brief than what was historically considered the purview of the office — which was pretty much nothing. "There's a general agreement that the office has become more important now than it was 50 or 100 years ago," Bauer says. "We now expect the vice president to be a full partner of the president in policy, not just to be an emergency replacement."

And this makes a No. 2 far more influential than anyone considered Agnew or Ford. Cheney amassed his own national security operation as vice president, which, according to the exhaustive account by my former colleague Peter Baker, exerted a stunningly powerful pull on George W. Bush's first term in office and, by extension, on this entire era of American foreign policy.

Second, vice presidents are now chosen by different criteria than they were in the days when party leaders were mostly concerned with geographic and ideological balance. With social media and scripted campaigns and a new poll coming out every 12 minutes, a nominee is just as often trying to captivate some narrow slice of the electorate or redirect the news cycle for a couple of weeks, even though the ramifications of that decision will be with us for years.

Palin, we now know, was just such a pick, chosen in a frenzy without a completed vetting process, because John McCain had been forced to abandon his first choice (Joe Lieberman) and was desperate to change the narrative of his flagging campaign. She was, by any reasonable non-reality-show standard, unprepared.

You could make the point, as I did to Bauer, that such decisions have a way of correcting themselves, since, at the end of the day, the choice of Palin for craven political reasons almost certainly hurt McCain more than it helped. But Bauer argues that was an unusual case and that, in the vast majority of elections, voters pay little attention to the No. 2 spot on the ticket. Two words: Dan Quayle.

I find this persuasive. The question, of course, is what kind of system we would propose the parties should use rather than the one they have. Bauer hasn't gotten that far.

Maybe you give the No. 2 slot to the candidate in your party with the second-most delegates. (Sure, the president and vice president might not get along, but you know, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson couldn't stand the sight of each other, and we've done worse.) Or maybe you force candidates to name their running mates as part of a slate in the primaries, so the voters have a chance to judge the ticket as a whole before casting their primary ballots.

That's all worth another column, and I'll apparently have plenty of time to write it after Clinton is nominated in a national outpouring of spontaneous adoration with a year to go before Iowa. (We'll see.) The point is that even the cornerstones of the democracy need to be patched and reinforced to keep pace with the cultural change in our institutions, and good ideas should get an airing, even when they come from lawyers.