Estes Kefauver

Barack Obama and John McCain seem to be playing a song and dance of “you first” when it comes to naming a Vice-President.

Given that the Democratic Conventions now offers little drama other than what will happen with Hillary Clinton, I would not be surprised to see both candidates play up to the networks and hold off their announcements until the actual convention.

This will give those reporters running around the convention (and those bloggers stuck in the orange tent somewhere in the vicinity of the Convention Center) something to do and those pundits assembled in glass boxes overlooking the convention floor something to speculate about. In short it would provide some needed excitement and purpose to an event that has become duller than watching a three-hour documentary about ants–in fact the way they make documentaries these days the ants might be better.

Once upon a time–and I use those words deliberately because these days real conventions seem like a fairy tale–convention delegates actually picked the VP without the candidate naming the person ahead of time. Thus all those obscure names that end up as final Jeopardy questions. Probably the most obscure twentieth century ticket is the 1924 pairing of John Davis and Charles Bryan. Bryan was the brother of William Jennings Bryan and the party hoped the name might attract some votes. Unfortunately the strategy failed when liberals bolted the party for the third party candidacy of Robert LaFollete.

Here’s a trivia question for you: Who was the last Democratic Presidential candidate to let the convention choose his running mate? The answer is Adlai Stevenson in 1956, where a riveting contest developed between Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver and a Massachusetts senator named John Kennedy. Kefauver won, but Kennedy’s surprisingly strong performance helped pave the road for his 1960 campaign.

Since then, the Presidential candidate has named the running mate. The one glitch in this came when George McGovern picked Thomas Eagleton, only to have the press uncover a scandal about Eagleton’s receiving electro-shock treatments. This produced a mini-revolt on the convention floor as delegates nominated alternatives, but in the end Eagleton prevailed.

If you know your history, you also know that in the early days of the Republic, the Vice-President was the candidate who received the second largest number of votes. In those days they still had yet to create the idea of a party ticket. Those pairings proved even stranger, the most notorious being the “team” of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

All this leads me to throw out one of my periodic wild and crazy ideas–if this campaign is all about change then let’s make a real change. Throw away the scripted moments and take a cue from television–make this convention a reality show for the VP candidates.

The question would be which format to follow? The VP sweepstakes have about them the tone of Survivor, but I’m not sure any of the prospects would do real well on some isolated island eating bugs. Maybe The Nanny would be more appropriate. Let’s see how good each prospect is at taking orders. Would they clean up the mess their predecessor left behind? What America really wants to know is how would the prospects handle Simon Cowell, Flavor Flav or Donald Trump?

Seriously, American Idol does offer one winning idea–why not let the delegates choose? Isn’t their collective wisdom as good as that of some panel chosen by the candidate?

For once the people actually would get to decide. What’s more, if you really want to attract some viewers what better way to accomplish this? For those too young to remember a real convention this would give them a taste of what conventions were like before they became Disney-like productions.

Obama could even compound the drama by waiting until the last minute to announce that he was going to throw the VP nomination to the convention.  That would suddenly bring people to the television screens.

So let’s throw away the carefully scripted moments when even the interviews are rehearsed and let’s once again trust in the American people to do the right thing.