Opinion | Job training for vice presidents like Kamala Harris should be better
That said, some posts prepare you better than others. Out of the nation’s 49 vice presidents, 15 have later become president — nine after the death or resignation of the commander in chief. It’s a job that delivered some of the 19th century’s worst presidents — Millard Fillmore and Andrew Johnson — and a few of the 20th century’s most accomplished: Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson. Given the near 1 in 3 chance that a vice president will eventually assume the top spot, it’s a wonder that so little thought has been given to the role — or that there’s so little on-the-job training for the one that comes next.
In corporate America, it is a different story. Large companies often put succession plans in place years in advance. Wall Street and board members like to know that the random vagaries of life won’t necessarily derail a successful company’s strategy or path. Grooming, teaching and transitioning to a worthy successor is treated as a top responsibility for high-performing CEOs. In its heyday, General Electric famously approached its succession plans with the rigor of a military invasion. JPMorgan Chase this year reshuffled its executive ranks trying to ensure that possible successors to longtime CEO Jamie Dimon have been exposed to different business units. But recognizing what skills and vision are necessary to lead in the years ahead is far harder than identifying what was successful already.
Given how seriously corporations take succession planning and the vast “continuity of government” plans that outline how presidential power would transfer all way down through the Cabinet in an emergency, it’s astounding that presidents and vice presidents have basically been left to themselves for 250 years to sort out how the two roles interact, if at all.
History rarely judges presidents by their successors, and presidents in a two-party system are more likely to be succeeded by the opposite party than their own — making on-the-job training of vice president appear even less important. “Since the start of our nation, the vice presidency has been an awkward office,” Walter Mondale said during a 2007 event at the Wilson Center. “Its occupants have, by and large, been notoriously unhappy.” Calvin Coolidge’s vice president, Charles Dawes, said the role involved little more than waking up and checking the president’s health in the newspaper. As late as Truman, the vice president didn’t even receive Secret Service protection.
In the television series “Veep,” Julia Louis-Dreyfus satirized the sheer irrelevance of the role; every time she came back to her office, her first question was, “Did the president call?” and every single time, the answer was no. The volume of Robert Caro’s LBJ biography that traces Johnson’s years as John F. Kennedy’s No. 2 boils down his powerlessness into the unforgettable, indelible image of him sitting in forced silence in Cabinet meetings: his “big hands clasped together, the intertwined fingers working nervously, so hard that his knuckles were white with the effort he was making not to speak.” Johnson actually had nightmares of being chained to his desk in the Old Executive Office Building.
A wider role for the vice presidency — and the job training that comes with it — began with Mondale, to whom President Jimmy Carter handed major portfolios. Future vice presidents George H.W. Bush, Al Gore and Dick Cheney each took the Mondale model and made it larger. (Cheney, if anything, made it too big.) Today, it exists in a strange gray zone — a semi-freelance adviser, more powerful than a Cabinet secretary, but almost always derided by nervous White House aides for being out of touch — or, just as often, not being the ultimate decider.
President Biden handed Vice President Harris a string of losing propositions, such as managing migration issues with Central American countries, but she’s been seen as an effective voice to rally female voters in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, speaking up about gun violence, and strengthening White House ties to the party’s many factions. Then, in a series of 9.0-on-history’s-Richter-scale social media posts on Sunday, Harris found her role completely transformed. She rose in a matter of hours from sidekick to party leader. She now faces a challenge familiar to other vice presidents who have found their influence altered in mere seconds as they assumed roles they…
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