CQ WEEKLY
– IN FOCUS
Sept. 21, 2008 – 12:14 p.m.
When the Ticket Splits From Within
By David Nather, CQ Staff
Back in July, Barack Obama dropped by the Senate to cast a vote that was deeply unpopular with his party’s base. The Illinois senator, who had just wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination, supported a rewrite of the nation’s electronic surveillance rules that, in the eyes of its critics, gave the president more power than the 1978 foreign surveillance law ever intended him to have.
One of the critics who made that argument, and who voted against the legislation, was Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware — whom Obama picked to be his running mate just six weeks later. Biden had been in the Senate long enough to have cosponsored the 1978 law; he was the author of an amendment that declared that U.S. citizens could not be targets of surveillance simply for exercising their rights to freedom of speech. Now, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman argued that the new legislation would upset the critical balance in the law between protecting national security and preserving the Bill of Rights.
Tensions at the top of major-party tickets rarely produce deep political schisms, for the simple reason that vice presidents don’t often win arguments with presidents. Whatever disagreements they may have, it’s the president who makes the final decision on policy disputes. But in the modern era of the vice presidency — ever since Walter F. Mondale got an office in the West Wing and access to all of President Jimmy Carter’s briefings — there has been no such thing as an irrelevant vice president, either. So early signs of dissension on each major-party ticket, however slight or nuanced they may now seem, could portend some significant policy dust-ups down the road.
Such disputes also aren’t likely to flow from unilateral policy calls from the next vice president, since that person is all but certain to lack the sort of power and policy clout that Dick Cheney has possessed. Vice presidential scholars already consider the incumbent an outlier, someone who benefited greatly from George W. Bush ’s willingness to delegate large amounts of authority and his receptiveness to Cheney’s strongly held views on national security and executive power.
But if Biden or Sarah Palin , the governor of Alaska picked by John McCain to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee, simply maintains the kind of role all vice presidents have had for the past three decades — including access to the daily intelligence briefings, a staff integrated with the president’s aides and weekly private lunches with the president — their views will make a difference.
“It used to be that vice presidents weren’t very relevant, until about 30 years ago. Now, they’re in the West Wing. They have access to the president 24 hours a day. So it does matter what they think,” said Richard Moe, who was Mondale’s vice presidential chief of staff and now runs the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
They won’t matter equally, though. Purely because of their different backgrounds, Biden stands to exert more influence in an Obama administration than Palin would in a McCain administration. That’s because even though vice presidents are still expected to fall in line behind a president’s decision, disagreements between the two tend to matter more with experienced vice presidents than they do with less-experienced ones. Biden, after all, is used to having the upper hand on Foreign Relations, where Obama is only the seventh-ranking Democratic member.
“It’s Biden who has much greater issue experience than Obama. These issues don’t tend to arise when you have an experienced president and a less-experienced vice president,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University who has written about the history of the vice presidency.
There’s another, obvious reason that Palin’s and Biden’s views matter: Either one could end up in the Oval Office. It has been 34 years since Gerald R. Ford became president upon Richard Nixon’s resignation. That’s the longest interval without a vice president ascending to the presidency in the middle of a term since 1841, when John Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison after his death.
“If there’s a succession, then it’s likely to make a difference” whether McCain and Palin view the world the same way or whether Obama and Biden see eye to eye, said Joel K. Goldstein, an expert on the vice presidency at St. Louis University. Either Biden or Palin would promise to continue the president’s policies, in keeping with tradition, said Goldstein — but “two human beings are going to see things differently.”
Getting to Yes
On broad policies, there aren’t likely to be a lot of disagreements between Obama and Biden. They rarely took each other on directly when both were after their party’s nomination. And their voting records are similar, although Biden has voted with his party less consistently than Obama has.
During his four years in office, Obama has sided with fellow Democrats on mostly party-line votes between 95 percent and 97 percent of the time. Biden’s range of annual party-unity scores is much broader, from 67 percent in 1978 to 98 percent last year. But the issues that spurred Biden to dissent from the views of most Democrats, such as his votes to ban the procedure opponents call “partial birth” abortion and amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget, seem unlikely to create big strains in an Obama administration.
When the Ticket Splits From Within
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Obama and Biden have voted differently a handful of times, such as on the U.S.-India nuclear cooperation agreement of 2006, in which Biden argued against all amendments and Obama voted for them. But most of their disagreements have been on domestic issues, such as class-action lawsuits and the merits of the 2005 energy overhaul, that aren’t likely to resurface anytime soon.
More significant, behind the scenes, could be Biden’s apparent view of Obama as a bit of a foreign policy rookie. That view spilled into the open last year, when Obama suggested in a speech that his administration might strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan if the Pakistani government doesn’t take action itself.
“It’s already the policy of the United States — has been for four years — that [if] there’s actionable intelligence, we would go into Pakistan. That’s the law,” Biden said during a Democratic presidential candidate debate in August 2007. In interviews at the time, he went further, suggesting at one point that Obama was “not smart” for making then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf vulnerable to opponents who could accuse him of giving up the country’s sovereignty.
“The problem is that you don’t announce that. You don’t talk about that. Because in order to get actionable intelligence, you have to deal with moderates within the country willing to cooperate with you,” Biden told MSNBC after Obama’s speech.
McCain at the Helm
With McCain and Palin, the relationship is the reverse. Since Palin’s experience is confined to the domestic policy issues she has dealt with — as governor for the past two years and as a mayor of the small city of Wasilla before that — it’s clear McCain himself would be the driving force on foreign policy and national security. So the conservative voters who have become so energized over Palin’s selection will have to hope she can have an impact on his thinking on social issues.
Unlike her Democratic counterpart, Palin doesn’t have a voting record or a lengthy debate history to provide a direct comparison with McCain’s views. But she has been outspoken enough on several issues to make her disagreements with McCain clear. For example, she is against embryonic stem cell research, even though McCain has voted for it as a senator and has even run a radio ad bragging about his support. In her interview with ABC News two weeks ago, she said her “personal opinion” was that researchers should not “create an embryo and then destroy it for research if there are other options out there.”
Palin also takes a harder line than McCain on abortion restrictions, saying she would allow the procedure only to save the woman’s life — not if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. She has expressed more skepticism than McCain that climate change is “man-made.” And, most famously, she is a strong supporter of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which McCain opposes.
There are occasional examples of a vice president’s disagreements with administration policy carrying the day. Mondale, for example, pushed successfully for a stronger defense of affirmative action than Carter had advocated, and against a Navy policy that barred picking up Vietnamese “boat people” at sea. More often, though, such differences become known only after a vice president breaks openly with the president, as Al Gore did as he prepared for his own presidential run following Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
“I don’t see a vice president’s views in the past as being anything more than an embarrassment if their disagreements with the president become public,” said Timothy Walch, author of “At the President’s Side: The Vice Presidency in the Twentieth Century.”
Reinforcement Work
Still, a vice president’s influence isn’t limited to disagreements. Experts on the vice presidency believe Biden would still be able to round out Obama’s not-so-deeply-developed views of international affairs. “I suspect that the foreign policy in an Obama administration will have large doses of Joe Biden, but it will be all mixed in with the stew, and Obama will get all the credit,” said Walch.
When the Ticket Splits From Within
One area where that’s most likely to happen is Iraq. Biden would be able as never before to push his plan for a long-term political settlement. Along with Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden has proposed turning Iraq into a loose federation of self-governing Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions, leaving a central government in charge only of common interests such as border security, foreign affairs and the distribution of oil revenues.
Right after Obama picked Biden as his running mate, the campaign put out a statement saying both believe the Biden-Gelb plan could be a good solution to the ongoing sectarian conflicts “if that’s what the Iraqis decide” — suggesting it could well become the policy of an Obama administration. But that language actually mirrored the mild critique Obama leveled against the plan before the primaries, when he warned that the United States could not “impose” federalism on the Iraqi people.
The critique annoys Gelb, who says he and Biden always made clear that their plan was not to force it down the Iraqis’ throats. “There are a half-dozen serious issues you could raise with the plan,” Gelb said. “That isn’t one of them.”
But Gelb also noted that many other policy makers raised the same objection. So when Biden put the plan before the Senate last year, he agreed to add a line to the non-binding resolution stating that “nothing in this act should be construed in any way to infringe on the sovereign rights of the nation of Iraq.” The Senate then adopted the resolution, 75-23.
With Palin, there is a risk that social conservatives would become disillusioned with McCain once again if she couldn’t show a clear impact on his thinking. And unless McCain were willing to give her some clear-cut victories, her lack of experience would make it impossible for her to force them.
Social conservative supporters “won’t be disappointed with her that she failed. They’ll be disappointed with McCain” for not changing his views, said Walch.
On most of her disagreements, Palin has made it clear she’s happy to defer to McCain. But ANWR drilling is the exception. “I’m going to keep working on him,” she told Fox News last week. “He is not asking me or anybody else to check our opinions at the door. He wants that healthy deliberation and debate with it.”
She might have an official reason to do that. Palin says she and McCain have agreed that energy policy would be one of her specialties as vice president, along with “reforming government” and advocating greater funding for students with special needs. But as much as Palin might want to change McCain’s mind on ANWR, experts on executive branch dynamics say, she has so little experience compared with McCain that she’s not likely to have the clout to do so.
“She’ll have to earn her spurs,” said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential historian at the University of Texas. “Her presence on the ticket is explained by reasons other than her expertise on issues, so she may have some convincing to do on that front.”
Light believes Palin would be successful on ANWR drilling only if McCain was looking to drop his opposition. “He may have wanted to change, and she might give him an excuse to change,” said Light. “But I can’t imagine her arm-wrestling him on that one.”
FOR FURTHER READING: Biden’s Iraq plan, 2007 CQ Weekly, p. 160; Cheney’s impact on the vice presidency, 2007 CQ Weekly, 1734; Palin and the Republican base, CQ Weekly, p. 2356; oil drilling, p. 2381; FISA (PL 110-261), p. 1900.
Comments
Possibly charged rape kits to victims, does not believe in evolution, religion is questionable, encourages shooting bears and wolves from lowing flying planes, troopergate, no abortions for rape or incest, supported the bridge to no where before she opposed it. Has a pregnant teenager, her only experiences with Foreign Relations is the fact she can see Russia from AL, Questioned a librarian about book banning and later the librarian was fired. Does not believe in Global Warming, and left her city in debt as Mayor. Has not submitted her tax returns yet. If you think she is a good candidate you deserve what you get.
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