The VP role has confused folks from day one

WASHINGTON — The great edifice that is the United States Constitution has always had eccentricities, wobbly parts, some joists held together with duct tape. From one edge juts a curious protrusion, an architectural afterthought. It is called the vice presidency.

The Framers didn't know what to do with the backup executive. He was conjured up very late in the summer of 1787, as the Constitutional Convention was winding down. He had no power at all, initially — he was just a seat-warmer, ready to step forward if the president were impeached or keeled over. Eventually the Framers gave him busywork:

"The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote" — you can see them winging it here — "unless they be equally divided."

So began the long and twisted saga of what John Adams called "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." His successor as vice president, Thomas Jefferson, had little interest in the job and went home to Monticello.

The third vice president, Aaron Burr, is famous for gunning down Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, and later tried to start a breakaway republic in the West, with himself as emperor.

So it went for many years and many vice presidents, none more egregious than the ninth, the debt-ridden, disheveled, wild-haired Richard Mentor Johnson, who spent much of his tenure in Kentucky, running a spa and tavern.

"Over most of America's history, the vice president has been standby equipment," says Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter's veep.

All that has changed, however. Mondale played a key role in upping the veep's profile. Today the incumbent vice president is widely regarded as the most powerful in history, a potent force, unfettered, almost a rogue operative.

The job remains sufficiently enigmatic that Dick Cheney recently contended from his White House sanctum that he was not, in fact, a member of the executive branch. And there is an active academic debate over whether the Constitution bars someone like Bill Clinton — now ineligible for the presidency — from being elected vice president.

In recent days we have seen again how the vice presidency enlivens our politics. Pundits obsessed over Barack Obama's search for a running mate, and pondered whether he should pick his archrival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. He played it safe, going with veteran Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. That rather ho-hum choice found its reciprocal number a week later, when John McCain picked as his partner Sarah Palin, the governor and "hockey mom" from Alaska. Reconstructions of McCain's decision-making process suggested that he knew her about as well as he knew his cable guy.

Mondale may be best known to the public as a failed presidential candidate (wiped out by Ronald Reagan in 1984), but among historians he's known as a game-changing vice president. He recalls that, after becoming vice president-elect in 1976, he paid a courtesy call on Vice President Nelson Rockefeller at his home. "He was typical of vice presidents. He didn't have anything to do," Mondale says.

They were waiting for dinner to be served when the phone rang.

"Ohhh," Rockefeller said, "how nice it is to hear the phone ring."

Mondale wrote a famous memo to Jimmy Carter outlining an expanded role for the vice president as a counselor with access to all the top national security meetings. He wouldn't have any line authority and wouldn't be put in charge of feel-good commissions like past vice presidents. He'd be more of a deputy president.

Carter agreed, giving Mondale a plum spot in the West Wing, an upgrade from the Old Executive Office Building.

But Mondale doesn't like how the office has evolved under Cheney.

"The Cheney presidency — vice presidency — has really gone off the tracks," Mondale says. "It became an office of secret, unaccountable, extralegal exercise of power. None of us ever thought it would be abused in this way."

The vice president's role has been a cause of confusion since early September 1787, when the Framers dreamed it up. Rifling through James Madison's notes of the Constitutional Convention, we see that the veep is made president of the Senate only because otherwise, as one delegate puts it, "he would be without employment."

The Framers' main concern was forcing electors in the Electoral College from the states to vote for two people, and not from the same state.

The reasoning, historians surmise, is that states would habitually throw their support behind a favorite son as the presidential candidate. Virginians would vote for a Virginian, New Yorkers for a New Yorker, etc. But if they had to cast a second ballot, that second choice, under the Constitution, couldn't be another favorite son.

In 1796, John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson, who became Adams' vice president — even though they were from rival political parties.

In 1800, Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, wound up with the same number of electoral votes. Because electors didn't distinguish between a "presidential" vote and a "vice presidential" vote, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives. Jefferson had to cut a backroom deal or two, and the House voted to give Jefferson the job he'd rightly won by popular vote in the election.

The episode demanded a Constitutional fix, the 12th Amendment, which requires electors to cast distinct votes for the top spot and the running mate.

Not once in the past half-century has a sitting vice president sought a presidential nomination and failed to get it. Fourteen men — one-third of our presidents — have first served as vice presidents. Of the 14 veeps turned POTUSes, eight assumed office upon the president's death, and a ninth, Gerald Ford, became president when Richard Nixon resigned.

Theodore Roosevelt came in through the veep hole, and ended up on Mount Rushmore.

Then there's Spiro Agnew, mostly remembered for resigning during a bribery scandal and calling the press corps "nattering nabobs of negativism."

History shows that Richard Nixon picked Agnew with minimal vetting. In his memoir "RN," Nixon wrote that Agnew seemed dignified and moderate, and might help with the states bordering the South.

Agnew quickly made a fool of himself, insulting a Japanese American reporter and using a slur to refer to Polish Americans.

There have been others who do not tower over the historical landscape. It seems likely that J. Danforth Quayle is doomed to have an obituary that will mention in the first few paragraphs that he couldn't spell the name of a common root vegetable. And there was Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's No. 2, whose rambling inaugural speech convinced listeners that he was completely sloshed.

Some vice presidents manage to surprise the skeptics.

Many felt Harry Truman wasn't up to the job when he assumed the presidency upon the death of FDR in the closing months of World War II. He hadn't been in the loop. He knew nothing of the Manhattan Project.

"Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman only saw each other twice during the 83 days they were in office together," reports historian Roger Porter of Harvard. But after taking some time to get his footing, Truman did just fine.