If Kamala Harris is elected president in November, she will of course make history as the first woman to reach the Oval Office. She will also be the first American president of Asian descent, and the first whose parents emigrated from two different countries (Harris's father came from Jamaica and her mother from India). But her election would also be historic in another way: It would add her to the surprisingly tiny club of sitting vice presidents who successfully ran for the White House.
Beginning in 1789, the United States has had 59 presidential elections (the 60th will take place this fall). Only four of those elections have been won by the incumbent vice president.
In 1796, after eight years as the nation's first vice president, John Adams was elected to the presidency, succeeding George Washington to become the nation's second chief executive. Four years later, Adams lost his bid for a second term when he was beaten by Vice President Thomas Jefferson. In 1836, with the support of Andrew Jackson, the popular outgoing president, Martin Van Buren became the third sitting veep to win election to the nation's highest office.
But in the nearly two centuries since then, only once have voters elevated an incumbent vice president to the White House. That was George H.W. Bush, who, after eight years as Ronald Reagan's No. 2, ran for president in 1988 and won in a landslide. Every other vice president who ran for president failed to pull it off. In 1860, the Democratic candidate for president, Vice President John Breckinridge, lost to Abraham Lincoln. In 1960, Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey lost to Nixon. And in 2000, Al Gore lost to George W. Bush.
 In 235 years, only four sitting vice presidents have been elected to the highest office in the land. Will Kamala Harris become the fifth? |
Somewhat surprisingly, it has been much more common for vice presidents to accede to the presidency upon the death or resignation of their predecessor. That became the path to the White House for nine men — John Tyler in 1841, Millard Fillmore (1850), Andrew Johnson (1865), Chester A. Arthur (1881), Theodore Roosevelt (1901), Calvin Coolidge (1923), Harry S. Truman (1945), Lyndon Johnson (1963), and Gerald Ford (1974). But only four of them (Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, and Johnson) went on to subsequently win a presidential election in their own right. None of the numerous other vice presidents who sought the presidency — including most recently Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle, Gore, and Mike Pence — achieved their goal.
Politicians who agree to run for vice president typically do so with the expectation that it will increase their chances of eventually reaching the Oval Office. So it is strange that voters have traditionally been so unwilling to elevate them to the top job. Why is that? The likeliest explanation is that by the time a sitting VP is nominated for president, the public has tired of the incumbent administration and wants to give the other party a chance to govern. Only twice in the last 100 years has a president reached the end of his term and been able to hand the job over to a successor from the same party: Calvin Coolidge was succeeded by Herbert Hoover in 1929, and Reagan was followed by the elder Bush in 1989.
Can Harris break the pattern? Before Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 election under pressure a month ago, his vice president was widely regarded as even more unpopular and unelectable than he was. In a nationwide survey at the end of May, a third of voters thought it likely that Harris could win an election were she to become the Democratic nominee. Several leading Democrats, most notably Barack Obama, were initially reluctant to support the automatic elevation of Harris to be the party's standard-bearer.
Yet against all odds, Harris has done what few analysts would have predicted — soared in popularity and generated waves of enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket. Heading into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she was narrowly ahead of Donald Trump in public opinion polls, and friendly media accounts were widely describing her campaign as one fueled by "joy."
Between now and Election Day anything can happen — this presidential campaign, especially lately, has been a cascade of unforeseen developments — but at the moment it's even odds that Harris will become the 47th president of the United States. If she pulls it off, it will be a history-making achievement on many levels. Not least because, for only the fifth time in 235 years, an incumbent vice president will have been elected to the presidency.
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On not being a supermarket jerk
Most of the people that I see during my weekly supermarket run appear normal and well-adjusted. But clearly there are lunatics and sociopaths among the Wegmans shoppers, because who else would have stuck a bag of frozen jumbo shrimp onto a shelf of disinfectant wipes and cleaning supplies? And what else could explain the appearance of a 16 ounce container of sour cream among the pretzels?
I have trouble imagining the mind-set of those who think that if you decide you don't want that jar of dill pickles after all, it's OK to shove it into whatever display you happen to be walking past rather than return to the aisle you got it from and put it where it belongs. I find such behavior unforgivably rude — inconsiderate to the store's employees and disrespectful to fellow customers. Alas, some people think only of their own convenience and have no qualms about being supermarket jerks.
As a kid I often accompanied my mother when she went grocery shopping. All these decades later I vividly remember two specific practices she always insisted on. One was that if something had fallen off a shelf — a box of cereal, a can of beans — you should pick it up and put it back, not walk by and leave it for someone else to take care of. The other was that there was no excuse for standing idly in the checkout lane while the cashier bagged all the groceries.
"There's nothing wrong with your arms," my mother would say. "Take a bag and fill it."
Those were simple lessons in supermarket courtesy and they left their mark. To this day I automatically bend down to pick up a fallen item and restore it to its place. And until checkout protocols changed during the COVID pandemic, as stores installed Plexiglas barriers to separate customers from cashiers, I generally used to help bag my purchases.
 Only self-centered boors do this. |
Happily, supermarket courtesy is still the norm. But boorish or thoughtless behavior seems to be getting more common.
It never fails to amaze me, for example, that customers think they have a right to sample grapes or strawberries or cherries when buying produce. What they're doing isn't "snacking" or "nibbling." It's stealing. Obviously it's fine to consume free samples provided by the store, but no one is entitled to help themselves to food without paying for it. Some people rationalize such theft by saying they want to make sure the cherries or grapes taste all right before buying it. Really? Do they also think it's OK to peel and eat a banana before buying a bunch? Do they take a few Oreos from the package to make sure they're not stale?
Here's another kind of supermarket jerk: Those who take a shopping cart to their car to unload their groceries — and then leave the empty cart in a parking space. Or shove it up the curb onto the median with planted shrubs. These are people who had no problem wheeling a cart into the store in the first place, pushing it up and down aisle after aisle, trundling it to the cashier, and then going with it to the parking lot. Yet once the cart is emptied, they can't be bothered to take 45 seconds to return it. Their laziness is compounded by their ridiculous justifications: "That's the cart wrangler's job." "It's too far to walk." "I don't want to leave my children in the car." Sure, there are sometimes exceptional cases. But 99 percent of the time, people who leave their shopping carts for someone else to deal with are just self-centered slobs.
We live in a time when discourtesy and incivility are on the rise, when too many celebrities and politicians behave like clods and spoiled brats, when life online can become unbearably hostile and insulting. All the more reason, then, to resist the trend. Grocery stores, like all markets, tend to be wonderful vehicles for promoting tolerance and reducing discord. Voltaire, writing about the London Stock Exchange in 1730, marveled at how it induced people of seemingly antagonistic backgrounds to transact together peacefully. On the whole, Wegmans, Stop & Shop, and Star Market do the same. Don't be one of those nitwits who ruin the experience for the rest of us.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Would we care about Buford Furrow if he hadn't used a gun?" Aug. 16, 1999:
No apology is necessary for paying attention when an evildoer opens fire on a group of children. But would the media be quite as interested in Buford Furrow if he wasn't, by their lights, a poster boy for gun control and hate-crime laws?
Suppose, for instance, that the kids he tried to kill weren't in a Jewish institution but in a nonsectarian day-care center. Suppose he went after them not with an Uzi but with some other lethal weapon — a 300-horsepower automobile, say. Absent the gun control and hate-crime hooks, would the press have covered his monstrous crime so avidly?
We don't have to suppose. Less than four months ago, just such an enormity took place. The media scarcely blinked.
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The Last Line
"Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out, and he was a beautiful butterfly!" — Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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