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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Dream Ticket Memories
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Contributor | The Sunset Provision |
Last Edited | The Sunset Provision Jul 27, 2008 10:45pm |
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Category | News |
Media | Newspaper - Wall Street Journal |
News Date | Monday, July 28, 2008 04:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
Description | July and August ought to see speculation about John McCain's vice presidential choice reach a fever pitch--and it is not just a political game. Instead, vice presidential selections can be among the most consequential decisions in American history. Running mates are often chosen with only short-term, purely political considerations in mind, so that even the presidential contender making the selection rarely realizes just how much he might be shaping long-term history.
Consider how little Dwight Eisenhower knew about the ramifications of choosing for his veep a man who had been in public office less than six years. Fifty-six years later, even from the grave, Richard Nixon is shaping Republican politics still. It was Nixon who took a particular shine to three 1960s-era congressmen, making two of them his personal choices as chairmen of the Republican National Committee and the third one a high administration appointee. The names Bush, Dole and Rumsfeld will surely ring a bell.
It was 28 years after Ike chose Nixon--and 28 years ago this summer, perhaps meaning that the time is exactly due for another momentous veep selection--that another GOP presidential nominee made a choice that would shape his party long, long after he left office. It also happened to be probably the wildest, most dramatic decision in modern convention history. All week long in Detroit in 1980, as conservatives celebrated their long-awaited takeover of the Republican Party via the presidential nomination of Ronald Reagan, speculation had been growing inside the convention hall and on the public airwaves that Reagan would choose former president Gerald Ford as a running mate. Never had a former president run on a national ticket again as a deputy to someone else, but Ford was more popular out of office than he ever had been in office, and he seemed sure to reassure voters worried (wrongly) that Reagan was too ideological for the job.
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