Running Mates and Carpet Baggers - 11 August 2000

I telephoned my son the other day, way up in the Rockies, just to hear how things were doing in Wyoming since Mr Dick Cheney - Governor Bush's choice for vice- president - had rushed from his Texas home back to Casper, Wyoming - his birthplace - to register there as a voter so that on 7 November the people who choose could legitimately vote for Bush and Cheney.

The Constitution specifically forbids the president and the vice-president to be residents of the same state.

I think there's a comic aspect to the choosing of Mr Cheney that could have come from the Pickwick Papers.

Mr Cheney, the former secretary of defence, is a man very little known to the public. We saw him and heard him occasionally during the Gulf War when he was President Bush's secretary of defence.

He retired from public life after a couple of heart attacks.

He came into the news again, just, about a month ago when Governor Bush chose him to head a small team, first to suggest names to be Governor Bush's running mate, then to pick several and do thorough background checks on them - a process that is all the more ruthless these days since about a dozen years ago the media started digging out small sins - what the victims called mistakes or inappropriate behaviour - on the part of the unlikeliest people including three senators and one man who was made Speaker of the House and lasted one day - 24 hours being all it took for the media shovelers to dig the dirt.

So finally Mr Cheney, head of the team to choose a Republican vice president, reduced the list to two or three when somebody - and they say it was Governor Bush himself - had a brainwave.

Governor Bush has confessed that he is not a great reader but he's been to the movies often enough to be suddenly struck with recall of one of the oldest plots in the business.

Why this far-flung search for the girl of your dreams when she turns out to live next door? In shorter words: why not pick Mr Cheney himself?

So to Mr Cheney's happy embarrassment: "Oh Governor, you really shouldn't have," Mr Cheney, in a Pickwickian sense, chose himself. And now is when it sounds more than ever like the election at Eatanswill.

I gather that the Bush team, not only the search and destroy team but the campaign advisors, were sitting around thumping each other on the back, in a manner of speaking, when somebody - a reader of the Constitution perhaps - suddenly remembered that while the Founding Fathers said nothing about having a president and a vice-president who were both big oil men it did say that in picking a presidential candidate and a vice-presidential candidate - I quote the 12th Amendment: "One of whom shall not be an inhabitant of the same state."

I'd love to know who recalled this provision and how Mr Cheney upped and said something like: "I have it: I was born in Wyoming, I can whip up there, transfer my Texas vote to my beloved home town, Casper, and become a legal inhabitant just in time."

"Right on." "Bully for you Dick." And off he went.

It was a close call. The public, which does not read the Constitution, had not had time to wake up and cry: "I say there, hold on old man, I mean ..." or "Take it easy, fella."

But the public in and around New York City has never stopped muttering "carpet bagger" at Hillary Clinton, the little girl from Little Rock, who came to New York City an age ago, made a big thing of mortgaging a house in a New York suburb and telling us she was a mad Yankee fan, so that she could run for the Senate in New York State. There is a residency requirement too in anybody's running for the US Senate or the House.

So it was an historic and a very necessary moment when Mr Cheney arrived breathless in Casper to embrace his old town, re-establish himself as an inhabitant and then fly off to meet Governor Bush and begin the long, punishing trail of a campaign tour.

And within the week the opposition couple did the same. After Vice-President Gore broke the last remaining thread of suspense by naming his vice-presidential partner, his running mate.

By the way that's a phrase I'm afraid I take too much for granted. A listener wondered not only what it meant but how it came about. Quite right.

Well, it's a horse racing term and derived from the practice of one owner, one stable, running two horses in a race - the slower one being put in there to pace the star. The pace setter was known, is known, as its running mate.

The phrase is just one century old but its use to define a vice-president was coined by, of all non-practitioners of slang - the most scholarly, the most ecclesiastical of presidents - Woodrow Wilson.

At the Democratic Convention in 1912 the presidential nomination went to Wilson. He got it after a terrific brawl on the 46th ballot.

Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey and he announced that his vice-presidential choice would be another governor, Thomas Marshall.

"And I feel honoured by having him as my running mate" - brought the house down, the only squeak of humour they'd ever had out of Woodrow Wilson.

If Wilson's mother had been alive she would have undoubtedly scolded him: "Thomas, is it possible that you've been attending one of those vulgar horse race meetings?"

Thomas Marshall, incidentally, is, like all vice-presidents, totally forgotten except today by students of American politics.

He is immortal for two slogans he cranked out wherever he appeared in public, which was seldom, during the election campaign. I doubt that either slogan would do him much good today.

He was a droll man and sophisticated enough to know well the ringing patriotic phrases, the hackneyed rhetoric, the boiler plate that would be expected of him.

So he parodied even the most obvious phrase like: "What this country needs ...". The Marshall version: "What this country needs is a good five cent cigar."

The other one, swiped from Kipling: "A woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke."

Mr Gore's choice of a Connecticut senator - Senator Joseph Lieberman - gives us, at last, something substantial, even intriguing, to talk about.

Senator Lieberman is a moderate liberal democrat, well liked by Democrats and Republicans alike.

He was the first Democrat to stand up in the Senate, after President Clinton's famous or infamous lie, and say the president's behaviour was not inappropriate, it was immoral.

Lieberman is known to be, himself, without fault or flaw in matters of personal honesty and marital fidelity.

All these qualities were no doubt considered useful to set off against the constant sideswipes at Mr Clinton by Governor Bush and Mr Cheney as they urge the voters to help restore dignity and decency to the presidency.

But the main point about Senator Lieberman is that he is a Jew, the first ever to be put on a presidential ticket.

The vice-presidency for much of the past 200 years has been a post to which the party wished to honour a non-entity who'd done the party some service. It has sometimes been a useful place of exile to shunt off a man whose ideas were too radical or threatening to the party regulars.

Theodore Roosevelt did such a job as police commissioner of New York City in reforming a corrupt immigration office - and, as governor of the state, of taxing corporations and going after the sweatshop owners - that he violently rocked the boat of the smooth-sailing Republicans.

They had the brilliant idea of tossing him into decorative oblivion by getting him appointed as McKinley's vice-president. Till then the vice-president had been almost a ceremonial post whose holder, it had been said, sat in the outer office of the White House hoping to hear the president sneeze.

Well McKinley was soon assassinated and Roosevelt became president and the reforming terror of the republic.

And however much demeaned the office has been since the public today is well aware of the alarming fact that eight vice-presidents have become accidental presidents, as we say, because of the sudden death of the president, five of them after the president's assassination. Facts which remind every voter that the vice-president is, as they say, one heart beat away from the presidency.

Now it could be possible to have a secular Jew whose race or religion played little part in his public life but Senator Lieberman is a deeply religious man - a practising orthodox Jew.

He will do nothing forbidden on Saturdays. He's said that for serious matters affecting the peoples' welfare he would go to preside over the Senate - his only official job - but he would walk not ride there.

Somebody said Jews may not be welcome in many country clubs but they have been received, even venerated, as justices of the Supreme Court. It's been almost a century since the appointment of Brandeis and Cardozo. Today there are two Jews among the nine justices.

But the prospect is there of a vice-president, like eight others, suddenly translated to the presidency.

So there is, at the moment, very lively and knotty discussion about the wisdom or folly of Mr Gore's decision.

The leaders of both parties applaud it as an act of courage. Here in the city of New York there is great elation and, among some prominent Jews, apprehension.

But New Yorkers are probably the worst judges in America of how the rest of the United States thinks and feels about the nomination.

For years I've played a parlour game with visiting Europeans - British men and women in this city on business - by saying to them: there are 265m Americans in the United States, how many of them are Jews?

"Ooh I don't know," they'd say. "Twenty, 30, even 40m."

The answer is 6m. Of them, 2m live in this city - in other words one American Jew in three lives in the city of New York.

A national poll, taken two years ago, found that, theoretically, about 90% of Americans wouldn't mind having a Jewish president.

If true it's an astonishing figure and shows a heartening decline in what you might call polite, unspoken anti-Semitism that in my time had tiptoed throughout the land.

Jews settled mostly in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. How they feel in Omaha, Nebraska, in Salt Lake City, in Cleveland, Ohio, in Michigan, in the other 49 states, we shall simply have to wait and see.

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