Beyond the Dome

With all of the questions being raised about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, there’s also a new round of scrutiny over a larger issue: whether we truly have the best system for picking vice presidents.

It’s not just about whether John McCain’s vetters did their jobs, or whether McCain made a rushed choice because he liked Palin and the social conservatives wouldn’t let him have Joe Lieberman. It’s also about the whole idea that the veep choice is up to the candidates and their team, and the convention delegates have to be little more than rubber stamps.

For more than half a century, vice presidents have been selected by the presidential nominees and vetted by their own people, and the party conventions have just ratified the choices. There hasn’t been a vice presidential candidate picked by a convention since Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson threw the choice open to the delegates in 1956. (They picked Estes Kefauver over a young John F. Kennedy.)

But this week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his campaign aides have spent much of their time defending the Palin choice. They’ve spent lots of time talking about the pregnancy of her 17-year-old daughter. Earlier today, they released her voter registration records to knock down suggestions that Palin used to be a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which wants a statewide vote on seceding from the United States. (Weirdly, they blacked out her birth date from all the records, even though it has been widely reported.)

And now, they’ll probably have to turn their attention to a Time magazine report that Palin tried to ban books as mayor of Wasilla.

The episode has highlighted the downside of leaving the running-mate choice entirely to presidential candidates: The vice-presidential candidate, who might well become the president someday, doesn’t get anywhere near the level of public scrutiny that the presidential candidate does.

“With vice presidents, it’s something of an afterthought, and suddenly the vice-presidential candidate appears almost out of nowhere,” said vice presidential historian Timothy Walch.

So far, at least, the delegates don’t seem to be making any moves to dump Palin. And that may be partly because she’s bringing in the cash. CQ’s Bart Jansen reports that Mike DuHaime, McCain’s deputy campaign manager and political director, told a meeting of the Log Cabin Republicans earlier today that before the Palin pick, the campaign was lucky to raise $250,000 online on any given day. In the period from noon to midnight the day McCain announced Palin would be his running mate, DuHaime said, the contributions shot up to $4.4 million.

Of course, that was before all of Palin’s latest problems. But Walch said he’s hard pressed to think of a better alternative to the candidate picking the veep, and other experts on the vice presidency say there probably isn’t one. The reason: Ever since Walter Mondale elevated the role of the office in the 1970s, the vice president has become so influential that he or she has to be someone the president can work with easily.

So even if there was a movement by some of the Republican delegates this week to dump Palin and replace her with someone else, it might create a whole different set of problems for McCain over the long run.

“The vice president is now a top adviser and a confidant. The president has to feel comfortable with them,” said presidential expert George C. Edwards III of Texas A&M University. The best solution is for the vetters to do their jobs and for the presidential candidate to choose wisely, Edwards said, and “in this case, it appears to have been poorly done. It appears impulsive.”

Joel K. Goldstein, a law profesor at St. Louis University, said the nation is “best off giving incentives to presidential nominees to choose well by punishing poor choices.” Unless McCain can put doubts about Palin to rest soon, that may be exactly what will happen.