Again, remember, don’t dismiss the importance of VP pick

This is an election year for thinking a lot about vice presidents.

Just over three weeks ago, our Editorial Board reflected on Donald Trump and the Republicans’ choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election with the observation that, given the age of both presidential candidates at the time, it was important that we voters become a lot more familiar with the No. 2 candidates than we have generally been in the past.

Even Vice President Kamala Harris, our editorial noted, was often dismissed “as a typically irrelevant sidekick to Biden,” and given the age of the two presidential candidates, both she and Vance needed more-serious scrutiny than vice presidential nominees normally get.

How quickly things can change in politics. And yet, how similar the issues remain.

By the following weekend, Biden had left the race, and suddenly the “typically irrelevant sidekick” is about to get all the scrutiny she can handle. But that doesn’t mean her new “sidekick” should rest easy. After the immediate honeymoon of his selection on the Harris ticket, voters also should want, and will need, more background on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

At 59, Harris does not represent the same types of risk that age imposed on a Trump-Biden matchup. But her choice of a running mate with little name or policy recognition outside his home state does seem to adhere to a common pattern — also seen in Trump’s selection of Vance — of appointing vice presidential candidates more for their regional or policy-balancing appeal than for their actual ability to govern.

That, it must be said, was also generally considered the criteria in Biden’s selection of Harris as his 2020 running mate. In such cases, presidents and party leaders always insist the nominee for No. 2 is ready to be No. 1, but the public often is not so sure and rarely cares much, tending to see the vice president as a pleasant but inconsequential garnish rather than an appetizing feature of the whole political menu.

Such thinking is both common and dangerous. Consider the record of vice presidents who have found themselves thrust into the presidential limelight. It is mixed at best.

Lyndon Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman come to mind as accidental presidents who were up to the job. Johnson was a well-known political powerhouse chosen by John F. Kennedy in the best tradition of keeping one’s friends close and one’s enemies closer. It was essentially ditto for Roosevelt vis-à-vis William McKinley. And Truman, who would eventually fool everybody, was a replacement pick chosen by Democratic bigwigs uneasy about incumbent Henry Wallace’s positions on segregation and communism if, as seemed likely and proved prescient, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s frail health couldn’t carry him through a fourth term.

Other vice presidents to ascend to the top job by circumstance rather than election include the unimpressive Calvin Coolidge, Millard Fillmore and Gerald Ford, and the downright traitorous John Tyler — he of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” fame, who would serve nearly four wretched years after William Henry Harrison’s 32-day term in office and go on to become a certifiable traitor, winning election to the House of Representatives of the rebellious Confederate States. Andrew Johnson, a U.S. senator from Tennessee who remained even after his state seceded from the Union, was brought onto Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 ticket for the sake of political appearances in the midst of the incumbent president’s struggling campaign for re-election, and he became the first president to be impeached — escaping removal by a single vote — and even more disastrously permitted racial policies to fester in the South that would disrupt race relations in the country for the next century.

As she mounts her sudden campaign for the signature role, it so far remains to be seen where in this roll call of unpredictability Kamala Harris would have placed should she have made it along with Biden to a second full term. At least now, though, she will get some serious attention as voters consider her not as garnish but as a selection in her own right. That is a welcome development. But it should not distract us from the in-fact-consequential duty to know whether, if circumstances change, JD Vance or Tim Walz offer the potential to serve as a nourishing main course or would wilt like an unsatisfying sprig of parsley.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His coming book “Conversations, community and the role of local news” is available for pre-order at eckhartzpress.com.