Don Pesci: Will Biden pick a Wallace or a Truman?
1944 election poster
VERNON, Conn.
President Franklin Roosevelt had three vice presidents, John Nance Garner, who broke with Roosevelt in 1940 and high-tailed it to Texas; Henry Wallace, whom Roosevelt chose as his running mate during the contentious 1940 Democratic National Convention over the objections of many delegates, and Harry Truman, chosen in 1944 and who occupied the presidency upon the death of Roosevelt.
Garner was once asked to evaluate the office of vice president. He said it wasn’t worth a warm bucket of spit. Actually, Garner used a different word, but sensibilities would not allow its appearance in the public media of the day – so, spit it was. Since Roosevelt’s day, sensibilities have evolved.
Sen. Edward Kennedy -- denominated “the Lion of the Senate” by fellow Democrats who willingly overlooked the significant part that Kennedy played in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick Island -- served Massachusetts in the Senate for 47 years, until he joined the angels in Heaven. At the time of his death, Kennedy was the longest continually serving senator. By 2009, when Kennedy died, there were few or no Edwardian sensibilities left to ruffle.
The deaths while in office of such political lions as Roosevelt and Kennedy are reminders to the rest of us that politics holds out to privileged politicians no special immunities from the Grim Reaper. Lions also are mortal. When the great politician and cleric Cardinal Richelieu died, the pope of the day, a lesser politician than Richelieu and a better cleric, was asked to comment. He said, “If there is no God, Richelieu will have lived a good life; and, if there is a God, he will have much to answer for.”
The American populace is not God and, increasingly, politicians are not answerable to the always disorganized democratic mob, so strong are the usufructs of incumbency at a time when individual politicians have become mini-political parties, raising their own campaign funds from Big Business, influential PACs and mass-marketing techniques. And, of course, the media, sometimes lost in adoration of incumbents, also boost the power of political power players.
It’s been ages since Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the coveted Pulitzer Prize is named, said that good reporters should have no friends. Good reporters should ask themselves when was the last time that an incumbent with whom they regularly did political business refused to return their calls as a result of a displeasing story.
The top of the ticket candidates in 2020, Republican President Donald Trump and likely Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, are both incumbent politicians with records to defend. It is generally conceded – perhaps most especially by Democrats – that former Vice President Biden’s choice of his second in command will be extremely important. Biden, so far, has not been truly tested on the presidential campaign field of battle because, it has been said, the Coronavirus infestation, perhaps on the wane by Election Day, has forced his campaign underground.
Old campaign warhorses, such as former Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, have stepped forward to assist Biden in choosing his running mate. Few doubt that Trump’s choice for 2020 will be current Vice President Mike Pence.
It may seem to some commentators ironic that Biden’s choice may mirror that of Franklin Roosevelt’s. Garner obviously was wrong in his estimation of the vice presidency. Roosevelt was wrong in choosing Wallace as his vice president, a man further to the left than Roosevelt on many matters important to Democrats and the country. And Truman, perhaps considered at the time a throwaway choice for vice president, was the right man at the right time after Roosevelt had left the stage. During Truman’s 82-day vice presidency, Roosevelt never discussed major policies with his vice president. Truman, for instance, learned of the atomic bomb only after he had become president. But he knew what to do with the bomb and clearly had Stalin’s number. The Truman Doctrine was the central pillar of an ultimately successful U.S. Cold War policy.
Among some Democrats, Biden is considered a safe moderate at a time when his party has been for some time caroming down dark and eccentric political corridors. As in Roosevelt’s case, there may not be many more years left in Biden’s hour glass. Biden is 77 and, like Roosevelt, he does have underlying health issues, such as two brain-aneurysm operations.
The important question up for discussion is: Will the moderate wing of the Democrat Party, now a bare remnant of what it was the glory days of the John F. Kennedy Camelot, be swept away by the current progressive movement, or will people like Dodd be able convincingly to appeal to the angels of Biden’s better nature?
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.