Our comment on last year’s election (“Bravo, President-elect Obama!,” FI, December 2008/January 2009) engendered vigorous reader discussion. Our closing recommendation, that vice-presidential candidates be chosen by primary voting and political conventions rather than simply being named by presidential nominees, sparked the greatest controversy. Some readers hastened to remind us that vice presidents had been elected before, with unsatisfactory results. That is true: until 1804, the candidate receiving the second largest number of Electoral College votes became vice president. In 1796 Federalist John Adams became president and Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson became vice president under this system; their relationship was stormy. After 1804, the Electoral College chose the president and vice president on separate ballots. As the nineteenth century unfolded, this role passed to the political conventions. A convention might choose a vice-presidential candidate with limited input from its presidential nominee. Not until the mid-twentieth century was it the norm for presidential candidates to decree their running mate: the first candidate to do so was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, running for his fourth and final term in 1940. The last candidate to leave the choice of running mate entirely to the convention was Adlai Stevenson in 1956 (his fellow Democrats gave him Estes Kefauver, spurning a promising young senator by the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy).
History shows us, then, that varied methods have been used for selecting vice-presidential candidates. A system under which conventions chose the running mate actually has more years of precedent behind it than our present system, in which nominees select their running mates.
Some no doubt disagree, but we consider John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate a rash choice that could have singularly ill-served the nation had McCain been elected and later died in office.
And so we would like to flesh out our earlier suggestion. Why not return to a system in which conventions choose the running mates? Each presidential candidate could submit a roster of, say, no more than three preferred running mates. Other names might be placed in nomination from the convention floor. If any were also presidential candidates, their showings in (we hope) more-orderly regional primaries could be taken into account by the delegates whose ballots would ultimately decide their party’s second standard-bearer.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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