By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
McALLEN, Texas |...It's a candidate's first major decision. Selection of a presidential running mate is always a Big Story. Quick analysis of the decision fills the nation's newspaper pages and time on broadcast news. American History shows us some winners and some losers.
In 1972, Democrat Walter Mondale picked a Midwesterner by the name of Thomas Eagleton, a U.S. Senator from Missouri.
Nice, everyone said. Good choice. And then it emerged that Eagleton suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life and had received electroshock treatment.
Eighteen days after being selected, Eagleton was out.
Republican George H. W. Bush caught a lot of heat after he selected Dan Quayle as his VEEP in 1989. The Indiana senator wasn't exactly the sharpest nail in the shed, they said. In a visit to an elementary school in New Jersey, Quayle led a classroom spelling bee. When a 12-year-old student was asked to spell the word "potato" on the blackboard, he did.
But Quayle corrected it to "potatoe," which was wrong.
Quayle never lived it down.
The examples are but two.
In 2006, Republican George W. Bush's VEEP, Dick Cheney, shot a fellow quail hunter while at a Texas ranch in Riviera south of Corpus Christi. The vice president claimed the shooting was an accident. The victim, Texas attorney Harry Whittington, suffered pellet wounds to his face, neck and chest but survived the shooting,
Cheney was criticized for not reporting the shooting. It wasn't until a day later that the ranch owner called the local newspaper to report the incident.
It can be crapshoot, although most VEEP selections seem to have worked out for winning presidential candidates.
Democrat Joe Biden, who served two terms as VEEP for President Barack Obama, had no missteps that embarrassed his boss, although it has been reported that he advised Obama against killing Osama bin Laden as Seal Team 6 prepared its mission on May, 2011.
Obama proceeded to give the order, and the world had one less terrorist to worry about.
The burning question this morning is whom will Kamala Harris select?
Harris’s campaign told reporters over the weekend that the first rally featuring Harris's running mate would take place in Philadelphia tomorrow, August 6, leading many to speculate that Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro is the pick.
Harris has not yet made a decision, though her campaign has focused specially on Shapiro and Arizona senator Mark Kelly, "with Minnesota governor Tim Walz also in contention as well as two slightly longer shots: Kentucky governor Andy Beshear and Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg."
We'll soon know.
It's not exactly the glamour job in Washington, D.C. Then Vice-President John Nance Garner, serving President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933-1941, once described the job as "not worth a bucket of warm piss."
The press later sanitized the quote by writing Garner had said "warm spit."
I don't know about you, but I predict Republican VEEP nominee J.D. Vance will deliver a whopper of a quote or misstep before this current campaign is over...
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