McCain/Palin: Sometimes the Most Nonqualified VP Picks Rise to the Challenge

Despite my earlier post basically saying that Sarah Palin is not qualified (right now) to be commander in chief, sometimes even the really bad picks rise to the challenge.

Although the vice presidency might not be worth the “bucket of warm spit” suggested by John Nance Garner, whoever has the job truly is just one heartbeat from the presidency — a reality that has visited this nation more times than actuarial tables would predict.

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 whose members 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.

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. In any case, McCain could obviously have picked someone with far more experience than Sarah Palin. Let’s just hope she is a quick study.