Vice presidential picks: What really matters?

WASHINGTON -- As Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain set about choosing their running mates, their vice presidential picks should come with a warning attached: Buyer beware.

Despite all the wild speculation about a vice presidential nominee's utility in luring women or landing Florida, history shows that a VP pick adds little if any political traction to a ticket and can easily do more damage than good.

What really matters is how the person affects not the campaign, but the office.

The next vice president will be, of course, heir to the presidency itself. Since Al Gore reinvented the office in 1992, the modern vice presidency has been transformed from funeral envoy to policy center. Dick Cheney, chosen to lend gravitas to an inexperienced nominee, built on those changes, establishing a power base second only to the Oval Office. The next vice president may not be as influential as Cheney, but experts say she or he in all likelihood will be the most powerful person in the next administration after the president.

"Gone are the days of Roosevelt's vice president, John Nance Garner, who said the vice presidency ain't worth a warm bucket of spit," said Allan Lichtman, a political scientist at American University. "In the post-Al Gore, post-Dick Cheney era, the vice presidency is a very important position."

What at first glance looks like a field of dreams for Obama and McCain on closer examination reveals a field of land mines. Take some of the top contenders:

Hillary Rodham Clinton for Obama? She might bring 18 million women and working-class voters to the ticket and unify Democrats. Or she might have the very undesirable effect of unifying Republicans. Clinton also brings her husband's murky library donors, whose names Bill Clinton has refused to disclose, bruised ambitions, low voter trust, a foot in the past and perhaps a rival power center in the White House.

How about Virginia Sen. Jim Webb? Webb embodies the white working-class men who are less than thrilled with Obama, writing joyous odes to the Scots-Irish blood of Appalachia that courses through his veins. A Vietnam veteran and former Republican Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, Webb offers dual appeal on national security and as an outreach to disaffected Republicans. On top of that, he's from Virginia, a key target of the Obama campaign.

Yet Webb also had trouble explaining why his aide carried a loaded gun into the Capitol (he said he needed "to be able to defend myself and my family"), and made comments in the past as sure to trouble women as delight men. Although he changed his view that women are unfit for combat, he referred to a Navy sexual assault scandal as a witch hunt. His comments were more nuanced than the fragments imply, but they would be fodder for campaign attacks.

Bobby Jindal for McCain? The new Louisiana governor is a rock star in the GOP, dubbed the Republican Obama. A Rhodes scholar and a person of color (he's of Indian descent) who improbably leads a former Confederate state as a fiscal conservative and reformer, Jindal has cut business taxes, broken through red tape that had delayed repairs to Hurricane Katrina damage and spent millions rebuilding infrastructure.

But Jindal is just 37 and has been in office less than six months. "Bobby Jindal is a tough call," said Republican strategist Rich Galen, who is advising another potential contender, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. "What is he, two years over the constitutional minimum? I think it really does draw a fairly stark comparison with McCain at 71."

So how about Carly Fiorina, McCain's top surrogate, a former secretary who broke the glass ceiling to become chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard? She was fired from that job and, having never run for office, would require a thorough vetting.

Any candidate for the modern vice presidency has to meet several criteria, Lichtman and Galen agreed. The first two are required. The rest are in descending order of importance:

-- Qualified to be president.

-- Shares the agenda of the boss. "Whoever's in the White House doesn't want to have to look over his or her shoulder at the vice president to make sure they're not marching off in some different direction," Galen said.

-- Shores up the candidate's weak spots. For Obama, this would be experience and national security. For McCain, age and the economy.

-- Sends a message: A female or minority pick would signal inclusiveness and boldness for either candidate. Picking Clinton would be a direct appeal to her supporters from Obama. Picking former rival and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee would send a message from McCain that he embraces Christian evangelicals.

-- Helps the Electoral College math. This is a last consideration, only after others are met and a candidate is really struggling in a must-have state such as Pennsylvania or Florida. Such calculations often fail. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry lost North Carolina in 2004 despite having that state's Sen. John Edwards on the ticket.

E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead(at)sfchronicle.com.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)