-By Warner Todd Huston
Who should be Romney’s VP pick? I know who it shouldn’t be!
I don’t want Paul Ryan to be Romney’s Vice Presidential pick. I also don’t want Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, or Marco Rubio to be picked. It’s not because I don’t like these guys, but because I do like them. It is precisely because they are good politicians, necessary politicians, effective politicians that I don’t want them wasted as a measly VP pick.
Does that seem counter intuitive? Well, as the founders always used to say, let’s let history be our guide. History tells us that the vice presidency is a career killer, a position to which we should try to avoid nominating our best guys.
Looking over the list of politicians that have run for vice president shows us a long, long list of fellows whose career essentially ended after the conclusion of the election. Even those candidates who won his quest for the second chair often found their political lives at a dead end once their term(s) were over.
Remember all the great stuff that Charles Fairbanks did after he left the Vice President’s chair? How about the heights of success that Vice President Alben Barkley went on to achieve? Does anyone recall the great works that losing VP candidate William Miller was famous for? Neither does anyone else. (Amusingly, Miller was one of the first people to appear on the “do you know me?” commercials for American Express credit cards. That shows how quickly he disappeared from the national scene.)
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Dear GOP, Let’s Not Waste Romney’s VP Pick on One of Our Best Guys, OK?”