Although the vice presidency might not be worth the “bucket of warm spit” suggested by John Nance Garner, Washington’s latest parlor game rage is to pick running mates for Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

In the halls of Congress, 24/7 on the cable news channels, on K Street and on bar stools across town, the only ante required to play Veepstakes ’08 is that you can breathe, have an opinion, and promise to not punch anyone in the nose when they suggest the one person on the planet you would least like to have a beer with.

Yet, despite that sobering reminder, and bar stool/parlor games notwithstanding, McCain and Obama strategists are, no doubt, playing a more hi-tech, specialized version of Veepstakes ’08 to calculate one simple thing: which governor, senator, House member, captain of industry, or former one of any of the above can help them get around the board to the magic number of 270 electoral votes required to win the election in November. Can’t fault anyone for that short-term thinking. Can’t have a VP to boss around if you are not P first. So getting there is job No. 1.

But given the realities of a post-9/11 world, and a two-front war that won’t end soon no matter who gets elected, McCain and Obama would serve their countrymen best if they minimized the generational, gender-based, demographic and other campaign “requirements” and simply put on the ticket the person they truly trusted to guide the country should they die in office, become incapacitated, or not be able to finish their term for any other reason.

Just one day after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, newly sworn-in President Harry S. Truman gaggled in the Oval Office with some reporters, letting them in on Washington’s open secret of the day: He wasn’t ready for the job.

“Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now,” he pleaded. “I don’t know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what happened, I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.”

Just 82 days after he first became vice president, Truman found himself commander in chief at a time of world war.

Right after being sworn in, Truman met with “his” Cabinet, some of whom he barely knew. Afterward, Secretary of War Henry Stimson lingered behind and then approached Truman to tell him something, cryptically, about a new explosive device that might become available for the fight. Truman later admitted to being perplexed, and Stimson followed up the brief chat with a letter on April 24, 1945.

“Dear Mr. President, I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter,” Stimson wrote. “I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under. It, however, has such a bearing on our present foreign relations and has such an important effect upon all my thinking in this field that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.”  

Just 13 days after taking the presidential oath of office, Truman learned about the atomic bomb. A few months after that he faced, arguably, the toughest decision ever presented to any American president in history, before or since.

It would be nice to think that, knowing how precarious the world situation is, and how physically ill he really was, Roosevelt saw something that others didn’t see in the straight-talking, backbone-of-iron senator from Missouri.

Like I said, it would be nice to think that. But the truth is that Truman, who first came to Washington as the hand-selected choice of a corrupt Kansas City powerbroker, was chosen as FDR’s running mate at the 1944 Democratic convention as an acceptable compromise candidate to make peace between two warring factions of the party.

Although making, or keeping, peace within one’s political party is something that both Obama and McCain need to be mindful of, they should also keep one eye on history as they consider who would be the best running mate.

A case could be made that with Truman we simply lucked out. Or perhaps God looked kindly upon the prayers of those White House reporters who saw a scared-to-death president up close and personal on his first day on the job. Something to think about as we spin the wheel during another round of Veepstakes ’08.

You can reach Jim Mills at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it