This is true of the productively busy and seemingly autonomous ones, as well as of the forgettable ciphers. In modem times it has become routine for an administration to boast that its vice president is more of a “partner,” more “in the loop,” more “in charge” in certain areas of government than any of his predecessors ever was. And no doubt there has been a pronounced trend to inclusion, especially given that these days so many vice presidents seem to be more practiced and knowledgeable in the ways of federal government than the presidents who took them on the ticket. But the relationship remains a dependent one. Any political glow coming off the vice president is strictly reflected sunshine from the president. And the expectations that we have come to accept for the job have a strong whiff of flunkyhood to them. A vice president may not publicly disagree, may not say no to any degrading assignment, may not get too attractive to voters on his own-may not, in short, become someone again. In my observation this tends, not always but an awful lot of the time, to bring out two seemingly contradictory qualities in the same man. One is deep, quiet, bitter resentment of the boss; the other is a sometimes downright disgusting willingness to dance to the boss’s tune, to do anything at all to please, to flatter in ways that revolt the onlooker.
Just as being a vice president doesn’t bring out the best in a person, having a vice president doesn’t, either. On the contrary, some presidents have been near sadistic in their treatment of their vice presidents; some have merely enjoyed taunting and humiliating them from time to time, especially as they are often dealing with guys who were once their chief rivals for nomination. These may be the extreme cases, but pretty much all have at least seen their vice presidents as give-it-to-Mikey-he’ll-eat-anything employees. By that I mean employees who will go out and, counter to interest or instinct, execute any distasteful mission for the boss or passionately, even floridly, defend his most indefensible actions. We have come to accept that vice presidents may be told by their principals to take the low road and do the political hatchet work so that those principals might be seen as above-the-kay statesmen. And we have also come to accept that vice presidents will do all this with an astonishing profession of loyalty and gratitude to the one who may be destroying their own reputations and ambitions.
And how do we, the public, react to this? Usually by joining the gang-up. It sometimes seems as if the whole electorate (not to mention the whole press) reconstitutes itself as the neighborhood kids where vice presidents are concerned and enthusiastically enters into the fun. We seem actually to like humiliating the poor fellows, or at least standing around and laughing while someone else is doing it. Never mind how straight-faced and Sunday-school grim we get when discussing a vice president’s awesome duties and so forth. Our much more common expression is one of mirth. The very term “vice president,” as used in much political conversation, carries some trace of ridicule with it.
There are some things I am not saying here. One is that Bill Clinton is responsible for any political trouble Al Gore may be in for his fund-raising activities. Gore is a grown-up, and he did whatever he did; he’s not a victim, though he may in some measure be a casualty, which is different. Another is that Gore embodies the disqualifying debilities of the office: I think that Gore is not the utterly hopeless example. He has got some of the vice presidential ailment, but not necessarily a terminal case.
The particular danger for Gore is that, first, his somewhat goody-two-shoes, dutiful-offspring public persona sets him up in this regard. It plays into precisely what the public makes fun of in a vice president and also exposes him to charges of rank hypocrisy when he engages in tawdry political business. So there is a limit on what he can do. There is no Saint Pol. The second danger comes from the fact that our politics has become so thoroughly image-driven. Gore’s backstairs counsel or diplomatic or bureaucratic achievement won’t be what counts for him. It will be all those ungainly, how-to-explain-it, what-do-I-do-with-this-champagne-glass photo ops. And on the public stage he will always be having to read the script, follow the guidance, do the boss’s bidding and not mess up, not look so full of himself as to agitate the White House politicos or so empty as to be a parody vice president.
When it goes wrong, as some part of it surely did on the China trip, he will get that uncertain, worried look, the look of a man on the spot trying to accommodate the presidential interest, the policy interest and his own interest. Whatever bold gesture or masterful rejoinder may come to mind and seem intuitively the right one for the circumstance will probably be rejected. Instead he will opt for some mincey compromise (like holding the toasting glass low, as if to hide it or to register a lack of enthusiasm) that gets him nothing and makes the guy with the other champagne glass seem in control. He will know that and look even more discomfited. It is the vice presidential look, and it comes with the office.
