The last vice president struck by lightning was Lyndon Johnson, before that Harry Truman, before that Calvin Coolidge and Teddy Roosevelt. The sequence is reassuring -- i.e., lightning induces a certain savoir faire in the people it hits. Can we ask for anything more? Federally guaranteed lightning?
On that score, the selection of Richard Cheney should meet with pretty general approval. Nobody is not going to vote for Bush because of the fearful prospect that Cheney might actually end up in the White House. The concentration is, rather, on whether the mere sound of Bush/Cheney is a more compelling sound than, say, Bush/Ridge or Bush/Keating. Most political analysts would probably tell you that manifestly it doesn't give off as galvanizing a sound as Bush/Powell or Bush/McCain --though there are probably 75 Americans left who wouldn't want to risk a black president, and 75 who wouldn't like the McCain they observed in New Hampshire and South Carolina as president.
My own view of it is that any man who is not ) president can't really be thought of as president, because the process of investiture, for understandable psychological reasons, is thought more sacramental than political. I illustrate the point by remembering the morning of Nov. 9, 1960. Scene, Hyannisport, the big summer room at the Kennedy family compound. One hundred reporters and cameramen are there at 8 a.m. waiting, as they had waited day after day, month after month, following around the campaigner and candidate, whom they referred to as Jack. The door opens and --everyone rises silently to his feet. That affable man they had mingled with, written about, played with, was suddenly the Prince.
That can't happen to a vice presidential candidate. It's different from the royal situation. The cameramen following Prince Charles hither and yon do so because Charles is going to be king. That isn't true in republican situations, where the vice president is by no means guaranteed someday to be sovereign.
There can only be one king, so that attention inevitably turns to the question: What can the No. 1 figure reasonably do to better his chances? He has to come up with a believable successor, and Bush has done so. There are those who think that his father stretched that challenge when first he came up with Dan Quayle. But if Quayle was indeed a liability, he was a liability Bush had the baggage capacity to handle: He did, after all, become president.