What's A Vice-President To Do? On Harris, Cheney, and Agnew

After Kamala Harris became the de facto Democratic Party nominee for President, the Trump Republicans didn't waste any time launching sexist and racist attacks on her. So far the Trumpublicans have:

• minimized Harris' electoral history by calling her a "DEI hire" 
• repeatedly and willfully mispronounced her name 
• accused her of sleeping her way to the top 
• argued that not having biological children is a reason for her not to be president

The attacks will get much uglier and weirder as Harris rises in the polls and we get closer to election day. 

Vice President Kamala Harris. Will racist and sexist attacks be enough to derail her quest for the presidency? 

There is one meme I've seen online that critiques Harris in a way that is perfectly legitimate. It asks very simply: "What has she actually done as vice president?" That's one of the most basic questions to ask of any candidate seeking an office: what have you done in your current position? 

Now when people ask me about Kamala Harris' accomplishments as vice president, my first response is this: without googling, tell me what Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Spiro Agnew, Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Al Gore, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence did when they held the same position. Those were all the vice presidents in my lifetime. 

Some Americans know that Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, while just about everyone knows Mike Pence almost got himself hanged by Trump cultists upset that he refused to commit treason to keep #45 in power. Even political wonks who follow Washington closely can't tell you much about the other veeps on the list. 

Why don't we know more about what vice presidents do? The simplest answer is that the vice president isn't really charged with doing much. Other than breaking ties in the Senate and presiding over the counting of electoral ballots cast in presidential elections, the veep does not have much formal power. The first Vice President of the United States, John Adams, put it best: "my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." John McCain reportedly said he would never accept the VP spot on a national ticket because, "the vice president has two duties. One is to inquire daily about the health of the president, and the other is to attend the funerals of Third World dictators. And neither of those do I find an enjoyable exercise." 

Absent formal powers, vice presidents are generally at their most effective when they work behind the scenes to help get the president's preferred bills passed through Congress, or when they serve as credible advocates for the administration's agenda. (Just as an aside, if we were to apply a JD Vance weirdness standard in assessing vice presidents, the greatest would have to be John Tyler. By the time he became veep in 1840, he had already fathered 8 children. After his first wife passed, he married again and fathered 7 more for a grand total of 15. On the Vance weirdness scale, Tyler's paternal potency should have entitled him to absolute power!). 

John Tyler fathered 15 children. In the weird world of JD Vance, that might make Tyler the greatest politician in the history of the United States.

Applying the criteria of working behind the scenes and advocating for the POTUS' agenda, Harris has been no worse than any vice president in my lifetime, and probably better than most. She's been a credible voice for reproductive choice after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, she's been outspoken on voting rights, and she's cast a record 33 tie-breaking votes in the US Senate. And while the Republicans' claim that Biden appointed her as the "border czar" is false, she did lead an effort to produce a substantive report on the root causes of migration. Contrary to Mr. Trump's deportation and border wall fantasies, any effort to address immigration meaningfully MUST address root causes.

It's rare for a vice president to make an impact in that office that survives their term. In fact in my life time only two vice presidents have done that: Dick Cheney and Spiro Agnew. Unfortunately, their impact was disastrous. I'll spend a little more space on Agnew, because this is a media rants blog and his impact was on media. 

Let's start with Dick Cheney. NPR's Nina Totenberg called him "a VP with unprecedented power": 

In the first term, Cheney reshaped national security law, expanded the prerogatives of the executive branch and orchestrated secret, warrantless domestic surveillance, circumventing a court set up by Congress specifically to oversee such surveillance. He presented the president with options that led to a shutdown of negotiations with North Korea, and played a major role in persuading President Bush to go to war against Iraq. 

Cheney also had extensive impact on domestic policies, from screening Supreme Court picks to forming tax and regulatory policies that benefited industries he was partial to. I have referred to the years 2001-2021 as two of the most shameful decades in the history of the United States. Dick Cheney's fingerprints are on almost every horrendous policy choice that created misery abroad and division at home. 

From a media criticism perspective, the most impactful vice president in history was Spiro Agnew, who was Richard Nixon's henchman from 1969-1973. Agnew resigned in disgrace so as to avoid being indicted on charges of tax evasion that occurred while he was governor of Maryland in the late 1960s.  

If one role of the vice president is to be an attack dog, no one played that role more effectively than Agnew. Much like a modern day Internet troll, he attacked "The Left" mercilessly, framed every critique of Nixon as being rooted in personal bias against the president, and famously pegged liberals as "nattering nabobs of negativism." 

Vice President Spiro Agnew's attacks on media greatly inspired Roger Ailes' later creation of Fox news and were also an early version of Donald Trump's "fake news" rants. 

On November 13, 1969 Agnew delivered a speech before a friendly group of Republicans in Des Moines, Iowa entitled "The Responsibilities of Television." Written by Nixon administration speech writer Pat Buchanan (who went on to run for president himself in 1992 and whose  "culture war" rhetoric became a fixture in GOP politics), the speech attempted to undermine the credibility of Nixon's broadcast television critics by characterizing them as out of touch elitists with no connection to the average American. He said, 

The purpose of my remarks tonight is to focus your attention on the little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every Presidential address, but, more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues in our nation. . . Of the commentators, most Americans know little other than that they reflect an urbane and assured presence, seemingly well-informed on every important matter. We do know that to a man these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City . . . 

For journalist Stephen Khan, in making a populist critique of media Agnew was "Trump before Trump." Khan correctly notes that "Agnew had demonstrated the vulnerability of the mass media to populist attacks, firing some of the first shots in a culture war that persists to this day." I would go even further and argue that, like Trump, Agnew actually made some sensible critiques of corporate mass media: they are not transparent about how ownership effects news and editorial coverage, they privilege controversy in selecting what to report for no purpose other than to drive ratings, and they are detached from working class Americans. But also like Trump, Agnew's purpose for making these critiques was not at all to promote media accountability and improvement, but to make himself (and Nixon) seem like small-d democrats by comparison. For political hacks/con artists like Agnew, Nixon, and Trump to lambast media as elitist and "fake" while situating themselves as being in sync with the "silent majority" of Americans is a kind of higher-order gaslighting that would be funny were it not so destructive to the body politic. 

As Agnew delivered that speech in November of 1969, a young Nixon Administration employee named Roger Ailes was listening very closely. In 1996 Ailes launched Fox News, a station that from day one has been Agnew-esque in how it undermines the authority of mainstream media at the same time asserting its own authority. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen aptly refers to Fox and its offspring as "resentment news," a style which can be linked directly to Agnew's media critique. 

Kamala Harris might not be the greatest vice president in history, but she most certainly is not a Dick Cheney or a Spiro Agnew. For that we should be thankful.