A cautionary tale for Joe Biden?

The septuagenarian vice president dithered while the Democratic field took shape. By the time he finally jumped in, the VP could not count on his former Senate colleagues to back his bid and never became the white knight he thought he would. The base wanted someone who was not part of the administration and who had not spent the bulk of his adult life in Washington.

Alben Barkley was Harry Truman’s vice president when Truman decided not to run for another term in 1952. Barkley, after watching others build campaigns, decided to run for the Democratic nomination late in the process and never got traction. His disastrous experience could be instructive for Joe Biden as he plots his own long-shot campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Barkely and Biden had each served 36 years in Congress when they were tapped by younger men to be vice president, partly for their friendships on Capitol Hill.

Biden was nine-years-old when Barkley ran at age 74. Biden is 72 now.

Like Biden, Barkley sought influence on foreign policy. He sat on the then-new National Security Council.

Truman decided not to run again in 1952 after the ratification of a constitutional amendment limiting future presidents to two terms. The war effort in Korea was going poorly. Joe McCarthy was sowing fear about communist infiltration at home. Labor unions and the left were frustrated with the Democratic administration.

Tennessee Democratic Sen. Estes Kefauver, in his late 40s, threw his hat into the ring, making a name for himself leading televised hearings into organized crime and public corruption. But he rubbed a lot of party leaders the wrong way, and they wanted an alternative after he won the New Hampshire primary and became the front-runner.

President Harry Truman does a final check of his 1951 State of the Union speech. That’s House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-Texas) seated on the left and Alben Barkley on the right. (AP)

Barkley was from Kentucky but could not count on the South. Richard Russell, the Georgian who now has a Senate office building named after him, won the Florida primary. Minnesota Sen. Hubert Humphrey, pushing for civil rights, was strong in the North but despised in Dixie. Averell Harriman, who had been an ambassador and Commerce secretary, siphoned off establishment support and won the West Virginia primary. (Today, basically all of Biden’s longtime Senate friends who are not from Delaware have made clear that they’ll stick with Clinton.)

Barkley could not catch the fancy of primary voters or party bosses, who held far more sway back then. Democrats eventually turned to Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, himself the grandson of Grover Cleveland’s vice president.

Biden, a keen student of vice-presidential history, surely knows all of this. During an event at George Washington University yesterday, he invoked Robert Caro’s book about Lyndon Johnson’s frustrations as John F. Kennedy’s VP. He reminisced with Walter Mondale, who served as Jimmy Carter’s vice president, about how Johnson then marginalized Hubert Humphrey when he got the top job.

Barkley was the last sitting VP who tried and failed to get his party’s nomination. But, generally, incumbent vice presidents running for the top job are less successful than is widely assumed. Only four have ever been elected directly to the presidency: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren and George H.W. Bush.

Barkley, like Biden in 2016, recognized that 1952 would be his last chance to run for president. As an interesting coda, though, he went back to Kentucky and defeated incumbent Republican John Sherman Cooper (Mitch McConnell’s mentor and hero!), allowing Democrats to retake the majority in 1954.

Age was a big problem for Barkley in that 1952 race, several presidential historians told me. It’s a possible liability for Biden too. One of the biggest potential problems for Clinton is that voters are fatigued after watching her for 25 years. But Biden has been on the national stage for 43 years. He was elected in 1972, the year that Richard Nixon won his second term. Sometimes slouching in a chair during his panel with Mondale, he talked about being mentored by Humphrey. He told a story about the time Mike Mansfield rebuked him for a negative comment he made about their colleague Jesse Helms. They also had a discourse on the Panama Canal Treaty, which Biden voted for – in 1978. Bernie Sanders is 74, but he’s a new face to most Americans.

Martin O’Malley is already implicitly making the age argument against Biden. “If he were to get into this race, he’d certainly bring a lot of experience and that perspective, but I think his generation is already overly represented in our party in this field,” the former Maryland governor said on “The View” yesterday.

Of course, no historical analogy is ever perfect. “Barkley had no reputation as an influential veep … whereas Biden has his seven years as a governing partner with Obama, in keeping with the trend developed by Mondale, (Al) Gore and (Dick) Cheney,” e-mailed Jules Witcover, the legendary political columnist who recently published a book on the vice presidency. Vice presidential scholar Joel Goldstein, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law, responded to my e-mail asking what he thought about the analogy by noting that, “Truman was pretty unpopular in 1952 and an outsider liked Adlai Stevenson II looked appealing. Obama’s popularity is climbing, the Democratic base continues to support him.”

 

Posted in whole from Washington Post The Daily 202