Hay 3 clases de vicepresidenciables: "Mr. August", "Mr. October" y "Mr. January"

En 2004, John Kerry clasificó a sus candidatos para running-mate en tres grupos, pensando en el calendario electoral. Ryan Lizza lo recordaba en New Yorker hace cuatro años.

In 2004, when John Kerry was conducting his search for a running mate, he divided his options into three groups, based on the electoral calendar. “Kerry said you can pick either a Mr. August, a Mr. October, or a Mr. January,” David Wade, who was Kerry’s press secretary at the time and is now serving in that role for Biden, told me. “In a perfect world, you have someone who is all three.”

By Kerry’s logic, Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor, whom John McCain named as his running mate, was an August pick, a choice made by a candidate who was falling behind and needed to re-start his campaign at his nominating Convention. An August pick can also help unite a party after a divisive primary. An October pick, too, tends to be political—someone with strong, even strident campaign skills, who might help to carry a state or a demographic group. Kerry’s choice—John Edwards—may have fallen into that category.

August and October picks have become something of an anachronism, and in that way Palin is a throwback to an era when Vice-Presidents were chosen by party professionals, strictly for electoral reasons. In office, they had little influence; sometimes, at the whim of the President or out of political expedience, they were dumped from the ticket. Abraham Lincoln dumped Hannibal Hamlin for Andrew Johnson in 1864, and F.D.R. got rid of John Nance Garner in 1940 and Henry Wallace in 1944 (replacing him with Harry Truman). Probably the greatest failure in the job since the Second World War was Spiro Agnew—the relatively unknown governor of a small state, Maryland, with no experience of Washington. It is hard to avoid comparing Agnew’s qualifications with Palin’s, despite all the talk about her “maverick” spirit, her role as the first female on a Republican national ticket, and her presumed appeal not only to the “base” but to disaffected Hillary Clinton voters. Like McCain, Nixon picked someone he knew would surprise people. Like Palin, Agnew was unleashed to attack the élites of his day and the press—“an effete corps of impudent snobs.”

Every Presidential candidate professes to want someone with the ability to help govern the country, and, in fact, the January running mate has become more common. Not surprisingly, the most powerful modern Vice-Presidents have been politicians who had congressional experience and long Washington résumés—Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore, and Dick Cheney. The January pick has increasingly become a good October choice, too. In recent elections, running mates chosen more for political reasons have fared less well than veterans.