There Must Be a Better Way to Choose

IT is all done in a 3 a.m. atmosphere by men in shirtsleeves drinking room-service coffee--elated, frantic politicians running on sleeplessness, juggling lists, putting out phone calls, arguing in the bathrooms, trying to make their reluctant minds work wisely as they consider an afterthought: the party's nominee for Vice President of the U.S. It is the worst kind of deadline politics. For a year or two, or even more, the vast American political machine has been rumbling and ramshackling along, sifting presidential possibilities. Now a running mate must be chosen, checked out, signed on and presented to the convention with a triumphant but seldom very credible flourish ("Tom who?" "Spiro who?")--all in a matter of hours. It is a procedure that invites error. Thus most vice-presidential candidates are too hastily chosen by only one man and his advisers, without any real democratic process or sufficient investigation.

Numerous alternative schemes have been suggested for selecting running mates, but the initial problem is as much psychological as procedural: a body of mordant lore has accumulated about the vice presidency as a limbo of political ambitions. Vice Presidents, said Truman, are "about as useful as a cow's fifth teat." Woodrow Wilson's Vice President, Thomas R. Marshall, remarked: "Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice President, and nothing was ever heard of either of them again."

Something of that attitude persists deep in the nation's partisan mechanisms. Why else would the parties continue to locate and ratify their vice-presidential choices so haphazardly, with so little foresight? Yet the vice presidency is not a meaningless office. Twelve of the nation's 36 Presidents have trained there. Eight of them have been thrust into the White House at a President's death. ,

The system has not been an unmitigated disaster--otherwise it would not have persisted so long. Some observers like U.C.L.A. Political Scientist Paul Halpern point out that it has actually produced favorable surprises, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman. On the other hand, it has also yielded up a succession of faceless mediocrities.

Harvard Political Scientist Samuel Beer has a sufficiently radical solution to the problem: abolish the vice presidency entirely. Says Beer: "I don't know what the hell the founding fathers were thinking of when they wrote a Vice President into the Constitution. The replacement of a President during his term is too important a matter to solve with a second man waiting in the wings. If there is a sudden need for a new President, the line of succession should be directed by Congress." Such is the case in Mexico and some other countries.

Joseph Rauh, a Washington liberal and civil rights lawyer, argues that the President and Vice President should not run as a slate but independently, after both have been nominated by delegates at the national conventions. Thus presidential candidates would compete in one contest, and vice-presidential opponents run against one another in a second-tier race. Voters could split the ticket. But what would, say, Edmund Muskie have done if he had been elected Vice President over Agnew while Nixon won the presidency in 1968? Muskie would have been frozen out of the Administration and hardly prepared to take over if Nixon suddenly died.

Originally, in fact, the Constitution provided for the electoral runner-up in November to become Vice President. But in 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in electoral votes for the presidency, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. That experience brought on in 1804 the Twelfth Amendment, which introduced the present method of vice-presidential selection. The present unwritten rules, though essentially undemocratic, at least allow the presidential candidate to put together a team. On the theory that the President and Vice President need to be a team and ticket of the same party, several suggestions for improving the No. 2 selection process have been made:

> A party's two leading presidential candidates should become the ticket, thus theoretically ensuring that two top men will run. Something of the sort occurred with Dewey and Warren in 1948 and Stevenson and Kefauver in 1956. The arrangement would mean that neither Spiro Agnew nor Tom Eagleton would have appeared on the ticket. But the two leading candidates might be bitter rivals. Nor would the plan necessarily allow for the kind of balancing and moderating of the ticket that customarily occurs at party conventions.

> A national primary for each party should be held to name its two candidates. The idea has some attraction, but in a national primary the strongest men in each party would run for President rather than Vice President. If John Kennedy had defeated Lyndon Johnson in a national primary in 1960, for example, then presumably L.B.J. would not have been able to run for Vice President.

In addition, a national primary would be an invitation to splinter parties. In 1968, Eugene McCarthy might have sensed that he would lose the Democratic candidacy to Hubert Humphrey and therefore run at the head of a fourth party, with George Wallace heading a third, Nelson Rockefeller a fifth, and so on. The winner in November might be chosen by only 20% of the electorate and find himself unable to govern.

> The tickets for President and Vice President should be slated from the beginning of the state primaries--McGovern running with Eagleton, Muskie with, say, Adlai Stevenson III, Humphrey with John Lindsay.

But, again, would any candidate of stature be willing to limit himself to the No. 2 spot before the convention?

> Let the convention nominate a presidential candidate only. Then the nominee would list several men or women who would be acceptable to him as running mates. Two weeks later, the Democratic National Committee would meet and, after polling state delegations, choose one from the list. In the two-week period, all of the vice-presidential possibilities would be interviewed extensively, make speeches, woo the delegates and national committee and, not least important, be investigated--with the resources of the Federal Government--to make sure that their backgrounds contained no political poisons. Political Analyst Ben Wattenberg, who proposes this method, points out that it would forestall panicky, last-minute talent scouting.

No system would be entirely satisfactory. It may be that the best compromise would be for the presidential candidate to make a list of possibilities and then let the convention decide in open balloting. McGovern considered giving the convention the choice this year, but then backed away. Unfortunately, it will be 1976 before either party will have the chance to demonstrate a better method for selecting a Vice President. But in the perhaps optimistic words of Author Frederick Sontag: "This will be the last convention that Americans will put up with this second-rate way of choosing a Vice President. This really can't go on any longer." A Vice President, potentially the most powerful man in the world, is too important to be chosen like a mail-order bride.

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