Reply #: In FDR's day, the vice president was totally irrelevant

[Ken Burch]

At least at the start(it was John Nance Garner, FDR's FIRST veep, who coined the phrase "not worth a bucket of warm piss" to describe the unimportance of the office in his day).

The question of who was veep didn't have any importance at all until FDR's campaign for a fourth term, when the hacks, Southern segregationists and antilabor types forced out Henry Wallace, FDR's sitting vice president, and replaced him with Harry Truman. They did this because it was considered almost certain that FDR wouldn't live through a fourth term, and they didn't want FDR replaced with anyone who still supported the New Deal(Those who did this were probably mildly disappointed, since events forced Truman to be a little more liberal than the anti-Wallace faction would have wanted).

Nobody thinks THIS president isn't healthy enough to survive a second term, and we've established it as a pretty firm convention in U.S. politics since 1944 that a president seeking re-election doesn't change running mates(the last time it did happen was 1976, when Gerald Ford appeased the far right in his party by dumping Nelson Rockefeller). But Ford was running as an unelected incumbent against a growing ideological opposition in his own party. That situation doesn't exist in this party, since Obama and Clinton agree on most issues, with HRC just being a bit to his right on a handful, none of which are making her more popular than he is at the moment.