The Young Turks

For the first four elections, filling the office of VP was mostly just a giant pain in the ass.  The problem was that it went to the second place finisher.  Then that guy had exactly ONE job.  Break ties in the Senate.  Keep in mind, that was the guy's ONLY job.  It appeared this was sort of a consolation prize, a check on the winner to have a rival have this small power (which was bigger back then as with only 26 Senators, there were more ties).

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson's choice for VP pulled one of the great dick moves in all of US History and bribed a guy to switch his vote creating a tie.  In the end, the man who hated TJ more than anyone in the world, Alexander Hamilton, decided that as fun as it would be to fuck over his big rival, he couldn't let a shitbird like Aaron Burr get the White House so he instructed his followers to install TJ.  Which was a good thing, because it turns out Jefferson was a straight up bad ass.

Burr? He went ahead and killed Hamilton (although only indirectly over this).  Burr ran off to Mexico and raised an army of the brown people to take over the US.  He lost.  Then, when some hack activist conservative judges (but mostly John Marshall) refused to let TJ hang the dirty son of a bitch while inventing legislating from the bench, Burr got a pass on the whole thing and got to hang around as a national embaressment a la Nixon until he stroked out in 1834.

You'd think at this point, they would have just amended the whole damn thing out of existence but no.

Now, to be fair, in the early days it wasn't a half bad place to run for president from, giving us three election winners in Adams(1796), TJ(1800) and Van Buren(1836).  Only one other man has run as the sitting VP and won.

Like an appendix, the VP office lived on.  Luckily, no one noticed much until 1840.

In 1840, all hell broke loose.  William Henry Harrison (famed Injun killer and Indiana Governor) was Ronald Reagan before there was a Ronald Reagan, by which I mean he was a lot older than any other president until Raygun Ronnie.  He, evidently, wasn't a whole hell of a lot smarter either as he gave a three hour speech in the rain for his inaugral and died thirty days later.

So what happened next?  No one had a clue.  See what the Constitution says is this:

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President

Which may seem clear to you, but at the time it was widely argued that the "powers and duties" "devolved" to the Veep, the office did not.  And any good constructionist would point that out.  It is also worth pointing out these people were a lot closer to the guys who wrote those words than we are.

The real problem wasn't so much the language as the man who was VP.  John "Tippecanoe and" Tyler "Too" was a disgruntled Democrat who had made an unholy alliance with the Dems enemies, the Whigs.  As such neither side wanted him to be president.  Imagine Leiberman as VP.  Would either party want him to take the office?

So the argument arose: Tyler can be VP until we can elect a new president.
Tyler won the day and the office by creating a clever alliance in his cabinet, offering them increased power in exchange for bringing key constituencies over to his side on the presidency thingy.

No sooner had Tyler been sworn in than he told everyone to go fuck themselves, pissed on everything Harrison and the Whigs had actually been elected by the people  to do (he vetoed the entire platform) and tried to go back to the Dems. 

But you can't go home again and they said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to a free presidency.  So Tyler did whatever the fuck he wanted.  And apparently what he wanted to do was promote and protect slavery.

Opposition to Taylor turned the Whigs into the party of the North and, by default, the Democrats became the party of the South.  Taylor had created the regional divide that would create the greatest crisis in US history.

For his trouble Taylor acquired a cool nickname (His Accidency) and the first impeachment resolution in US history (it did not pass).

But you gotta love the stones on this guy.  In 1844 he tried to run for reelection.  After being laughed at by both parties, he nominated himself with his own, brand spanking new National Democratic Tyler Party (no truth to the rumor it was based in Connecticutt).  After securing that parties nomination, he went on a honeymoon with his new 24 year old wife.   He was evidently amazed to find out when he returned from playing Fred Thompson no one was going to vote for him.  So he dropped out.

When the Civil War broke out, Tyler went with the South.  He died in 1862, a former president in active treason against his country.  He is the only president ever to not be officially mourned in Washington.

I just thought while you are casually throwing around that Dick Cheney is the worst/most important VP in history, you might want to know who he may or may not have beaten out.

Beginning with Taylor, VPs got hot.  Two presidents later, one got the big chair.  Zachary Taylor gave way to Millard Filmore, but let's be honest, no one gives a shit about either one.

In 1865 we have a big one.  Southerner Andrew Johnson takes over for Northerner Abe Lincoln.  Everyone hated him, mostly because he was an asshole.  He did log another presidential first, first to be impeached.  Gee, those VPs to Prez guys sure are popular.

In 1881, Garfield (the fat president, not the fact cat) was shot a couple of months into his presidency.  He took a while to kick off, but when he did, Chester Arthur took over.  I don't know much of interest that either one of them did but I can tell you the office of VP was considered so vital to the country at the time that Arthur served almost an entire four year term without bothering to fill the job he had ascended from.

In 1900, the high water mark for VPs was reached.  Another president caught a bullet but this time it was, with all apologies to the McKinley family, a really good thing.  Teddy Roosevelt was kind of the Sarah Palin of his day.  A celebrity that no one actually wanted to be president but people found fascinating.  Luckily, when he became president, he laughed off the McKinley platfom and did whatever the hell he wanted to.  Except this time he did shit people wanted.  This appears to be a watershed moment when attitudes towards VPs who become Prez change from unfettered hatred to downright admiration.  Consequently, Teddy became the first VP to ascend and be reelected.

Next came Calvin Coolidge, who got to be president when Harding had the good fortune to die before he became the first president to be removed from office (and he would have).  Coolidge got reelected so he could continure the hard work of completely destroying the US economy and leaving Herbert Hoover with a giant stinking turd of a presidency.  Thanks Cal!

In 1945, Harry Truman won the FDR Vice Presidential lottery.  I mean, lets get real. He was going to die eventually.  One of his revolving door of veeps (he had three) had to become president at some point.

In 1963, the second Texan ever to take the office did so in the wake of JFK's assasination.  LBJ ran the streak of reelected ascended VPs to four before becoming really, really, unpopular.

The last VP to take the presidency without election is the one man to become president without ever winning a federal election.  Ford was, essentially appointed president in 1974 as Nixon knew he wouldn't be around much longer.  For the crime of cutting a deal with Tricky Dick (a pardon for a presidency), Ford was so disliked he lost to Jimmy Freakin' Carter, the first VP to lose reelection as President since 1884. 

Incidentally, Nixon is the only VP to be president who did not ascend or get elected while serving as VP.

The only other man to be both President and Vice-President is Cenk Uygur boytoy, George H. W. Bush.

That is if you don't count Cheney, who, shadow government aside, is the only man to be acting president for a day without assuming the office of the presidency.