Word: mates
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...Given their difficult history of tangling over just about everything, hardly anyone would have expected Bob Dole to pick Jack Kemp as his running mate in 1996 - least of all Kemp. As little as three weeks before he was selected, recalls Dole's campaign manager, Scott Reed, Kemp was grumbling in GOP circles that he hadn't been given a speaking spot at the party's convention. So why did Dole pick him? "We were going for oxygen, heat and energy," Reed says. "We went through the traditional list, and we just weren't happy with what we were coming...
...could balance his moderation with a dose of conservatism, and came up with Dan Quayle. The ticket beat the Democrats that fall, but by 1992 even Bush was trying to nudge him off the ticket. The ploy failed. Which is a reminder that however you choose a running mate, another rule will always apply: hard as it is to find a good one, it is sometimes harder...
Senator Barack Obama's campaign is considering picking a military man as a running mate to compensate for Obama's limited national-security experience. But it's far from clear that military experience raises the prospects for a successful presidency. While Dwight D. Eisenhower won pretty good White House grades following his 43-year Army career, Jimmy Carter (seven years in the Navy) didn't do so well. Old soldiers still grimace when recalling the military highlight of that presidency: 1980's failed mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran. The Desert One fiasco killed eight U.S. service members, doomed...
...vital. But none of that dims the luster a former general or admiral can bring to a ticket. Officers tend to be mediagenic: slender, ramrod straight and well spoken, especially on foreign policy matters. (Well, there was the exception of the late James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate in 1992, a retired Navy vice admiral who famously opened that year's vice-presidential debate by saying, "Who am I? Why am I here...
...strength of a military guy would be credibility on national security," says Scales, a military historian and former commandant of the Army War College. "The great weakness is that he lacks any type of regional attraction, which, to my mind, is really the primary purpose in picking a running mate." Indeed, military officers often move every three or four years, essentially making them political transients...