Prospective clients, particularly foreign ones, often request that my initial contact with them occur some place sociable, and that was exactly the case yesterday evening. After leaving the office, I made for the bar at the Washington Hilton, on Connecticut Avenue near DuPont Circle, where a fellow from Ghana is staying. Not everybody from Ghana is poor, you know. Inevitably, like most clients from places like Ghana, this gentleman was still in his local time zone, which is invariably at least an hour later than Eastern Daylight. So, as luck would have it, while I was nursing a cocktail, waiting for him to show, none other than Kopficker, a long-time John Edwards staffer, walked up to my table, smiling genially.
“Why, shake my tail and call me shivers,” Kopficker spouted, all smiles and southern corn pone, “if it ain’t old Tom Collins, the sharpest blade in the Capital shed!” In keeping with his usual manners, Kopficker didn’t wait for me to say hello and ask him to join me. No, he just sat right down at my side, plunked his Seven and Seven on the table and jovially slapped my back. “And what brings you to this particular watering hole tonight,” he inquired, “business or pleasure?”
“Business,” I replied, pointing at my watch. “Waiting to meet with a foreigner who may throw some of it my way.”
“Lucky I ran into you, then,” Kopficker mused, sipping thoughtfully. “You’re just the sort of person I should be talking to at the moment.”
“How so?”
“Well,” Kopficker drawled, “I’m sure you know that my man, John Edwards, has thrown all of his support behind Barack Obama.”
“So I heard,” I responded, a bit dryly. “Nice gesture.”
“Quite nice indeed, Tom,” Kopficker agreed. “But we’re not sure whether John’s going to be able to knock Hillary out of the box with it, though.”
“Say what?” I was frankly mystified. “Which box?”
“Aw, you know,” Kopficker elaborated, “the VP spot on the Democratic ticket.”
“You mean,” I shot back, astounded, “that John Edwards wants to run for Vice President again?”
“Sure,” Kopficker vouched, nodding as he took another sip, “why not? After all, he can do the work, can’t he?”
“And you figure Hillary’s shooting for the second spot on the ticket with Obama, too?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Kopficker affirmed confidently. “She’s going to start negotiations for it just as soon as the primary voting ends. Unless,” he snorted, “some kind of [expletive] miracle occurs and she ends up with more Democratic delegates than Obama. Her people, of course, they’re talking as if having Hillary in the VP slot is the best thing since push-up brassieres or something. Like she would be doing Barack the biggest favor anybody ever did him – a ‘dream ticket’ they call it. Some dream, huh?”
“If you want to call the worst belladonna nightmare a sot with delirium tremens detoxing in a locked mental ward ever had a ‘dream,’” I opined, “then yeah, running Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama’s VP is a ‘dream ticket,’ all right.”
“Exactly what I say,” Kopficker chimed in. “She’s the perfect poison pill for Obama’s campaign. But,” he smiled slyly, “look at the other option – John Edwards. He’s strong in the same demographics as Hillary is…”
“You mean,” I clarified, “that white working class men who didn’t attend college will vote for him.”
“You bet,” Kopficker beamed. “John would bring a number of significant strengths to the ticket, and that’s undoubtedly one of them – and an important one, too.”
“But he’s already run for Vice President,” I protested.
“Right,” Kopficker agreed. “And he’s the reason Bush didn’t whip Kerry’s butt even worse than he did back in 2004.”
“Oh, I get it,” I followed up, “now John Edwards is going to be the reason why McCain didn’t whip Obama’s butt even worse in 2008.”
“Uh-huh,” Kopficker nodded, eagerly. Then, realizing what he was agreeing with, quickly backpedaled. “No, no, Tom,” he chuckled, “little jest there on your part, I see. No, what John Edwards is going to do is push Obama over the edge…”
“Into the abyss…”
“Right, right, into the abyss… Hey, wait a minute… Ah, no, to victory, that’s what. He’s going to push Obama over the edge to victory.”
“And then,” I observed, “John Edwards will be Vice President of the United States.”
“Yep, that’s right,” Kopficker chortled.
“The job,” I informed him, “about which John Adams said ‘My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.’”
Kopficker’s face fell as his cocktail glass stopped, halfway to his lips. “‘Most insignificant?’”
“Yeah,” I vouched, “that’s what he said. And you know, of course, that Daniel Webster turned down the vice presidency.”
“Did he say why?”
“Uh-huh. He said ‘I do not propose to be buried until I am actually dead.’”
At that, Kopficker put down his drink, placed his elbows on the table and frowned deeply. “Sounds kind of negative, don’t it?”
“You know,” I asked, “who John Nance Garner was?”
Kopficker pondered for while, then shrugged, spreading his hands apart, a puzzled look on his face. “Beats me. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the guy.”
“I’m sure you haven’t,” I continued, “and there’s a good reason for that, too.”
“What?”
“John Nance Garner was Vice President of the United States.”
“Really? How long?”
“Eight years.”
“No kidding? When?”
“Between 1933 and 1941, during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first two terms. You know what John Nance Garner said about the vice presidency?”
“What?”
“He said it wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.”
“Now I don’t know about that,” Kopficker argued gamely, while obviously still taken aback, “what about Dick Cheney’s interpretation of the job?”
“Oh,” I smiled, a bit gleeful that Kopficker would lay a trap and then walk right into it like that, “sure; you mean Cheney’s contention that the Vice President is neither part of the Legislative Branch nor part of the Executive Branch, except when he says so, in which case it’s part of either one as he deems necessary and expedient to run the country while George is out to lunch.”
“Yeah, yeah, like that,” Kopficker enthused.
“Come on now,” I chided, “you don’t think a President Obama is going to let a Vice President Edwards treat him like Cheney treats Bush, do you?”
Kopficker considered my question carefully for a few seconds. “No, I don’t, ” he sighed, wistfully. “Of course not.”
“See here, Kopficker, my friend,” I advised, “as a wise man once said, the vice presidency is for people who want to be something and not for people who want to do something. They must have enough ambition to want the job but not enough ambition to do anything if they get it. Now, does that sound like the John Edwards you know?”
“Not really,” Kopficker admitted.
“Of course not,” I agreed. “John Edwards wants to be President! He has always wanted to be President! Did he ever campaign to be Vice President? Of course not, nobody campaigns for that – they campaign for President and accept the vice presidential slot when they lose the nomination to somebody who got more votes than them. The same thing goes for Hillary Clinton! Neither of them ever wanted to be Vice President. Can you imagine, some little kid, running for student council, dreaming of growing up some day and becoming Vice President of the United States?”
“That is kind of hard to imagine,” Kopficker conceded, “I’ll give you that.”
“You’re darn tootin’,” I affirmed, “it’s nearly impossible to imagine, unless that little kid is some kind of retard, like Dan Quayle – somebody so dumb, they can look back at their term of office and say something like ‘I stand by all my misstatements.’”
“Yeah,” Kopficker concurred, “there would definitely have to be something wrong with them… you know… upstairs.”
“And say what you want about John Edwards or Hillary Clinton,” I confidently asserted in my best southern dialect, “ain’t neither of ‘em stupid.”
“Y’all got that right,” Kopficker responded in a hearty tone.
“Besides,” I pressed on, “think about it – not that it could ever happen, but, oh, I don’t know, suppose, around the last week in October, John McCain announces that, in order to give America its first woman President, right after his inauguration, he’s going check into Bethesda Naval Hospital and get a sex change. So the Democrats win, and Obama’s President, and, let’s say Hillary Clinton is Vice President.”
“Okay,” Kopficker nodded, “let’s suppose that. Then what?”
“Well,” I elaborated, “imagine how she would behave. She’d be running her mouth 24/7, saying exactly what she thinks, disagreeing with the President whenever it suits her and letting the chips fall where they may.”
“Probably,” Kopficker agreed, returning at last to his Seven and Seven, apparently not noticing that it had gone all watery and flat.
“And you can be sure, without a shadow of a doubt, that if Vice President Hillary Clinton has to break a tie vote in the Senate, she’s going to be voting her own conscience and convictions, not President Obama’s.”
“Yeah,” Kopficker muttered, “I get the idea. Vice President Hillary Clinton would be a monumental, cosmic pain in the [expletive] for the President, the Senate and the entire United States of America.”
“Now,” I went on, “let’s look at the other scenario – your man John Edwards – let’s say he’s the Vice President. He’s not going to run around like a chicken with its head cut off, stirring up trouble at every opportunity, constantly trying to attract media attention like Hillary would. Oh, no, John’s going to be Mr. Congeniality. Why, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, Kopficker, I am so sure. He’s going to toe Obama’s policy line down to the last detail; he’s going to support the President in every aspect, no matter what happens; and if the improbable ever occurs, why, you know he’s going to call up President Obama and ask him how he would like that tie in the Senate broken before voting, you can be certain of that!”
Kopficker gazed morosely at his rapidly decomposing Seven and Seven. “Okay, Collins, I get your point. Stepping on his own personality, suppressing his own ideas and ignoring his own convictions for eight years would make John absolutely miserable.”
“But he’d do it,” I asserted confidently, “I know he would, just so he could, after all those years, finally have a better shot at what he really wants.”
“To be President,” Kopficker murmured, staring at his cocktail glass.
“Mr. Collins? Mr. Tom Collins?” I looked up to see the cheerful round face of my potential client from Ghana, who shook my hand vigorously as his gaze shifted to Kopficker. “And who is your friend?”
“This is Mr. Kopficker,” I explained, “of the John Edwards vice presidential campaign.”
Kopficker shot me a cold glance.
“A vice presidential campaign?” Our visitor from Ghana struck a puzzled look. “How does that work?”
“We arrange,” I explained, “for two losers from our presidential primary campaigns to fight it out tooth and nail behind everyone’s back for a bucket of warm spit.”
“Ah, I see,” the Ghanaian gentleman smiled, “and when the fight for that bucket of warm spit is over?”
“If their party prevails in the general presidential election, the winner gets a Cabinet post.”
“And the loser?”
“The loser has a choice – either take the vice presidential slot on their party’s ticket in November, or…”
“Or what?”
“Drink that bucket of warm spit.”