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Pence seeks to go where no vice president has gone before – UnlistedNews

It may not make it to the Oval Office. But it will make it into the history books, at least as an asterisk.

When Mike Pence formally kicks off his underdog campaign for the White House on Wednesday, he will become something almost unheard of since the founding of the republic: a former vice president running against the president who originally put him on the ticket.

While it’s not unusual for tension and even feud to develop between presidents and vice presidents, never before has a No. 2 mounted a direct challenge to a former running mate in the way that Pence takes on former President Donald J. Trump. for the Republican nomination next year.

After all, vice presidents generally owe their national stature to the presidents who elected them, and even if they’re not especially grateful, it’s rarely politically feasible for them to compete with their patrons. But Pence is betting that Republican primary voters will eventually tire of Trump and turn to the 2016 and 2020 ballots of the other member of his party.

“Having a former vice president challenge the president who served for his party’s nomination in contested primaries is like a 234-year flood,” said Joel K. Goldstein, a vice-presidential specialist at St. Louis. “It does not happen”.

“Defeated presidents don’t run again in modern times,” he added, “and vice presidents tend to inherit the support of their administration’s supporters, not become pariahs for them,” as Pence has done since he defied the Trump’s efforts to nullify the 2020. election.

The broken relationship between Trump and Pence is itself a historical anomaly, of course. Trump sought to pressure Pence to claim the power to effectively reject Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the Electoral College, a power the vice president said he did not have. Mr. Trump was so angry that he publicly criticized his own vice president, prompting a crowd to seek him out while chanting “hang Mike Pence” on January 6, 2021. According to testimony, Mr. Trump suggested his aides that perhaps his supporters were right.

“The reason no other vice president seems to have run against their president is that they were selected by the president, and there is almost always a personal bond that comes out of a sense of loyalty and gratitude,” said Richard Moe, who was the head of staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale. “I can’t think of another vice president who has been treated with more disrespect than Pence by Trump.”

There are no precise parallels with the current situation. In 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams and defeated the incumbent’s bid for a second term. However, in those early days of the republic, the vice president was not the president’s running mate, but the second-highest vote-getter in previous elections. Adams and Jefferson had clashed in 1796, Adams prevailed, and Jefferson became vice president because he came second.

The 12th Amendment ratified in 1804 changed that system so that the vice president was elected along with the president as part of the same ticket. That didn’t mean they were always on the same team. Many tickets have been forged between rivals who had just competed for the nomination, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush in 1980, and Barack Obama and Biden in 2008.

Some vice presidents became hostile to the presidents they served, such as when John C. Calhoun openly opposed Andrew Jackson during the nullification crisis that pitted South Carolina against Washington over a tariff. After being eliminated from the re-election bid in 1832, Calhoun resigned the vice-presidency to take a seat in the Senate and resist the agenda of his former running mate. Still, Calhoun never challenged Jackson as a candidate.

In 1916, former President Theodore Roosevelt and his former Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks won support on the initial Republican convention ballots, but they were not actively campaigning against each other. Hubert Humphrey and his 1968 running mate Edmund Muskie ran in 1972 for the Democratic nomination, neither with success. In 2000, former Vice President Dan Quayle ran against George W. Bush, the son of the man who put Quayle on the 1988 and 1992 ballots.

But the closest the country came to a direct contest between running mates was in 1940 when Vice President John Nance Garner, a conservative Texan known as Cactus Jack and not a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, launched a pro-white campaign. Home.

Garner was known for his love of whiskey, once noting that “I don’t get drunk but once a day.” He is most famous today for his sour assessment of the vice presidency, which he declared was “not worth a bucket of hot spit,” or some variation of that.

Since no president up to that point had run for a third consecutive term due to the precedent set by George Washington, it was not entirely clear that Roosevelt would be a candidate in 1940, and he made no move to prevent Garner or other associates from running. Still, there was no love lost between the two. “I see the vice president has thrown his bottle, I mean his hat, into the ring,” Roosevelt quipped to his cabinet.

Garner, a traditionalist, had fallen out with FDR over the president’s effort to pack the Supreme Court and opposed breaking Washington precedent. “In retribution, he declared that he would run for the 1940 presidential nomination, but he never put his heart into it and no one took his candidacy seriously,” said Moe, who wrote “Roosevelt’s Second Act,” a book about the 1940 race.

Roosevelt played coy all the way to the Democratic convention, when he finally arranged to be “drafted” to run again. Roosevelt swept the nomination with 946 delegates. Garner finished third with 61.

That election marked the beginning of another change. Until then, the parties generally chose the vice-presidential candidates, but from then on the nominees effectively assumed that decision. Roosevelt chose Henry A. Wallace and let Garner retire to his Texas ranch.

At this point, Trump may regret the decision he made in 2016. But it’s not clear that Pence fare any better than Cactus Jack.

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Sara Marcus
Sara Marcushttps://unlistednews.com
Meet Sara Marcus, our newest addition to the Unlisted News team! Sara is a talented author and cultural critic, whose work has appeared in a variety of publications. Sara's writing style is characterized by its incisiveness and thought-provoking nature, and her insightful commentary on music, politics, and social justice is sure to captivate our readers. We are thrilled to have her join our team and look forward to sharing her work with our readers.
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