The sudden resignation of Sarah Palin from the Governorship of Alaska brings back bad memories of the disaster of her Vice Presidential candidacy last year, after being selected by Senator John McCain.
It also reminds one of other Vice Presidential choices in the past forty years that were regrettable, with two of them unfortunately fulfilling the role of Vice President in a worrisome way due to the victory of their Presidential running mates. I am referring to Spiro Agnew, elected with Richard Nixon in 1968, and Dan Quayle, elected with George HW Bush in 1988.
Both were disastrous as Vice President, and in both cases, we could have ended up with them in the White House. If Spiro Agnew had not been uncovered with his taking of cash bribes in the Vice Presidential office, as he had done earlier in the Maryland Governor’s office and the Baltimore County Executive’s office, he would have succeeded Nixon when the President resigned to avoid impeachment in the Watergate scandal. Agnew had already divided America by attacking liberals and the news media and labeling anti Vietnam war demonstrators as traitors.
If George HW Bush had died in office from atrial fibrillation or from his vomiting on the Japanese Prime Minister (which at the time caused a lot of laughter and jokes LOL 🙂 ), we would have been faced with a new President who was most famous as Vice President for saying such things as that he wished the Middle East was as quiet and uneventful as the Midwest, and that he wished he had studied Latin so that he would understand Latin America better, on a tour of the area. He also could not spell the word "potato" before a student group, and generally made a fool of himself, to such an extent that when Bush was ill, it was said that there was a "political earthquake",  as it was portrayed in a news magazine!
We cannot afford to have the kind of irresponsible behavior displayed in the past by Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and John McCain. Presidential nominees of both parties MUST be convinced that their running mates must be picked not only on narrow political considerations, but also on the basis of qualifications to replace a President who might leave office prematurely. In the dangerous world we live in, we cannot afford to make a mistake in the number two position. We need more in the vein of Hubert Humphrey, Henry Cabot Lodge, Edmund Muskie, Sargent Shriver, Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, George HW Bush, Lloyd Bentsen, Al Gore, Jack Kemp, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and yes, even Dick Cheney (who despite the controversies over his Vice Presidency, came to office qualified to be President).
There has to be a better vetting process to avoid the kind of scary circumstances that we had to deal with in 1968, 1988, and 2008.