As Jason Linkins noted in The Huffington Post today, no one’s learned that lesson harder and with more consequence than the 1972 Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, when he signed off on Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, who turned out to be a man with a deeply troubled past that included electro-shock treatment for depression.

It wasn’t always like this. Before the 12th Amendment was ratified in 1804 and replaced Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution, the person who was awarded the Vice Presidency was the Presidential runner-up in the Electoral Vote count. The electors had two votes they could cast for President, and the candidate with the most votes would be President, and the one with the second-most, Vice President. Presented in a modern context, you can understand what a problem this might be if Albert Gore and John Kerry had become George W. Bush’s Vice Presidents. In any case, there was no pageant, no vetting, no comparative profiles in the leading media outlets of the day. Number two was Number Two. Period.

The glaring problem with this system was that it was inherently manipulable. When Federalist John Adams ran against Democratic-Republicans Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr in 1800 , Adams lost the electoral vote by 73 to 65–with Burr also grabbing 73 electoral votes. Ruh-roh. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. Burr, it turns out, engaged in a bit of arm-twisting behind the scenes, albeit not as effectively as he could have, but in the end, he and his presumptive President were tied in electoral votes. The election was left to the Federalist-controlled House of Representatives. The Federalists had no love for Jefferson, and the vote was stalemated for a week. Jefferson eventually emerged victorious, but it was clear that this was no way to choose an Executive Branch Number Two.

With the passage and ratification of the 12th Amendment, electors now had to cast two distinct votes–one for President, and one for Vice President.

And thus our current Veepstakes was born. What ensued over the next 200-odd years was a fine mess indeed. There were the elections of 1804 and 1808 where the party nominated and elected George Clinton, who’d been circling the drain since 1795, when he confessed, in his farewell as New York’s Governor, “I have been so long dealing in Speeches that I have found it difficult to draft one for the last session without committing Plagiarism.” His detractors were less complimentary. Said John Quincy Adams, ““Mr. Clinton is totally ignorant of all the most common forms of proceeding in the Senate…a worse choice than Mr. Clinton could scarcely have been made.”

Governor Clinton was elected Vice President first for Thomas Jefferson, and then for James Madison. He died in office. Under President Madison, his seat was never filled until Madison ran again in 1812 and selected Elbridge Gerry–who also died in office.

Ever since, the selection of the person who was to be the second-highest officeholder in the land has been little more than an afterthought. Until the 25th Amendment, which codified the rules of Presidential succession, was ratified in 1967, the office of the Vice President–the second-highest office in the land–was left vacant for a mind-boggling 37 years.

No wonder then that history has given us the likes of John C. Calhoun, who served as VP under both Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson–who said on his deathbead that “Posterity will condemn me more because I was persuaded not to hang John C. Calhoun as a traitor than for any other act in my life.” Or Richard Mentor Johnson who held and married his slaves, and sold one because she had the audacity to leave him. Or Hannibal Hamlin, who didn’t have his boss President Lincoln’s courage and chose to show his Civil War mettle as a seaman in the Maine Coast Guard. Or Spiro Agnew who couldn’t let go of his contractor kickbacks when he was Governor of Maryland and accepted bundles of money in his Vice Presidential office.

Jason Linkins’ article on former Senator George McGovern today invoked the Hippocratic Oath. “First, do no harm.” To your own candidacy, as the article implied in context.

Senator McGovern’s first Veep pick was a disaster. After being rebuffed by Ted Kennedy and a number of other party luminaries, he settled, with dangerously-little vetting, on Senator Thomas Eagleton from Missouri. They hadn’t finalized the would-be nominee’s travel schedule or his acceptance speech before it was leaked by persons in the know that he’d been hospitalized for depression in the 1960s and had undergone electro-shock therapy. Mental health issues attract more sympathy in 2008 than they did in 1972, and no one in this country does electro-shock therapy anymore (Guantanamo possibly excluded). This was frightening stuff in 1972.

McGovern didn’t help himself in his handling of the issue. He initially pledged to support his nominee “1000 percent.” That number dropped precipitously over the next few days, before the Senator decided to cut the Man from Missouri. It took a machete, as Eagleton wasn’t willing to go at first. After the buttons had already been printed, McGovern was boxed into the humiliating position of having to change horses ten feet out of the gate. Eagleton would only cop to being “one rock in a landslide,” but his selection was the rock that led the avalanche.

This is the first substantive decision you’ll make as a President in audition, and it isn’t one you want to screw up.

On the other hand, the axiom is true that “voters don’t vote for Vice President,” so you do have a certain amount of wiggle room. After all, America didn’t hold Dan Quayle against George H.W. Bush.

It’s still high stakes, though. As dubious as many of these selections have been, there have only been 43 of them who have ever taken the oath (excluding Adams, Jefferson, and Burr–all pre 12th Amendment Veeps). That’s a fairly small fraternity, no matter how insignificant their office accomplishments might be, and that’s why we pay attention. It’s unfortunate for those of us who relish the tantalizing drama of a prominent public figure sending a bullet through his left foot, but there likely aren’t many Tom Eagletons who are roaming around the short list. George McGovern’s advice is salient, but probably unnecessary. As long as Senator Obama doesn’t consider the charisma of Al Sharpton or decides to definitively nail down the Illinois African-American vote by inviting former Congressman and convicted statutory rapist Mel Reynolds out of retirement, he shouldn’t do much harm to his candidacy.

But I was off on the strangest but most powerful female obsession for a horny 18-year-old surrounded by sexually-wanton coeds. I was in love with Gerry’s cute bob, her smoky voice, and the fact that her husband possibly had mafia connections and could probably with a phone call or two have someone’s legs broken (okay, that was later disproven, and all anyone could find out was that he owed an enormous amount of back taxes and rented one of his warehouses to a porn distributor–still, that was kind of cool). I had harbored no previous hopes that a woman could join the Executive Branch, but this particular woman captivated me. I knew if Walter made one misstep with her, her husband would threaten to beat his doughy, lutefisk-loving Minnesota ass into the next losing Democratic election cycle, but that she’d back him off–and then go do it herself.

As a college freshman dependent upon his parents and who had squandered most of his college money the last three years of high school on marijuana, clove cigarettes, Rainier Pounders, and corn dogs, I didn’t have copious amounts of discretionary income at my disposal to buy my ultimate campaign totem in time for the election, so I gave plasma every place and time they would let me, and one of the kids over in Bean Complex who gave me weed for typing his papers for him told me about an immunology professor looking for lab assistants. True, I was a film major at the time and was currently failing General Biology 1, but he was being picketed by really belligerent animal rights activists and was desperate for anyone who would sign on. It took two weeks handling tuberculosis-infected rhesus monkeys and getting pelted by the protesters with rotten fruit and some weird animal feces every afternoon when I’d come into the lab, but by Halloween afternoon I had enough money to pay a local silk-screener to print a rush order for a blue satin baseball jacket with Gerry’s huge picture on the back and “Ferraro ’84″ in cursive on the left breast.

Every day I almost got into a fistfight when I walked past the Boys from Brazil at the Delta Theta house and their “Reagan Country” signs all over the lawn. I wasn’t about to let them fuck up my jacket, though.

Needless to say, I was crushed on Election Night when Walter and Gerry got beaten like Duk-Koo Kim. I drank seven cans of Magnum Malt Liquor and stumbled over to the Delta Theta house at 4:00 AM to vomit on as many Reagan signs as I could. I made sure I left the coat back in my dorm room, though, on the finest wooden hanger I could steal from an unattended professor’s office.

That jacket was my most prized possession until 1992. I was living in Portland, Oregon and working as a Distribution Center Manager for a nationally-prominent cookie and muffin producer. We sold raw cookie dough to convenience stores and schools and loaned them little convection ovens to bake the cookies in. I wasn’t a cookie fan, but I developed this huge jones for raw cookie dough, and suggested to the student manager at one of the larger high schools we were supplying that they could make a lot more money if they sold raw doughballs instead of baking the cookies.

It was an innocent suggestion, and at the time I had no idea how salmonella was contracted. But after three kids wound up being treated, the little bastard ratted me out, and about eight minutes after it hit the local papers I had to endure an obscenity-laced 20-minute phone tirade from the company CEO that was worse than any reaming my Dad ever gave me. At the end of the call I was fired and he’d already contacted a local security company to show up and escort me off the premises.

So, unemployed and having cashed out my 401(k), I had time on my hands and watched a lot of television, including a repeat of this horrendous 1984 true-story Movie-of-the-Week about a Vietnam POW who sent love letters home to his wife. It was dreadful, and I almost forgot about it, until a few days later when I was reading an article on H. Ross Perot who had just gone on Larry King and said he’d run for President if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all 50 states. The article mentioned Perot’s work on behalf of Vietnam POWs and mentioned the name of this woman, Sybil Stockdale, whose husband had been a POW. Ding! I remembered that name from that abhorrent TV movie rerun I’d just watched. It was the Jim and Sybil Stockdale story.

With a lot of time on my hands and the 401(k) money burning a hole in my pocket, I was gambling quite a bit more than usual. An old friend from college had introduced me to an utterly irredeemable bookmaker who would probably take bets on the casualty count of an African influenza pandemic (in fact, he did brag about taking action on the 1987 “Baby Jessica” rescue drama. He said he lost about $4,000 when the rescue succeeded but he’d placed enough side bets on how long the rescue would take to “head home with a couple Clevelands in my pocket”).

I was bored out of my mind in Portland, so I tossed a dufflebag into my 1990 VW Fox and drove down to Sparks, Nevada, where the bookie liked to hang out. After a long evening of drinking, the talk turned to the ’92 Presidential race. I mentioned Perot, and in a moment of drunken chutzpah, said, “Mark my words: Perot’s getting in and he’s going to name James Stockdale as his running mate.” Of course, a fool and his money shall soon part company, and that’s never truer than when a bookie has his eyes on it. It wasn’t until the next day that he figured out who James Stockdale even was, and asked if I my johnson was still as big as it was the night before, and if I wanted to put $500 on my bold prediction at 44-1.

And damn, who knew? I’d never been that lucky. It wasn’t two weeks later that Perot held a news conference at the Loews Annapolis Hotel in Maryland and announced Stockdale as an interim running mate. He could have haggled over the “interim” designation, but most bookmakers aren’t baby-eating monsters. He honored his end and promised me my $22,000.

I took another drive down to Sparks and came back home with my Clevelands–all 22 of them. Unfortunately at the time I was subpoenaed for a deposition in the salmonella lawsuit that had been brought against the company, and the CEO had promised that if they had to pay, he’d put an army of lawyers on me and that the next one of his cookies I ate would be from a batch the company donated to a homeless shelter.

Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly in a position to be waving money around, so I squirreled it away.

Fast-forward ten months later. The lawsuit was settled out of court, the cookie company lost interest in exacting their pound of flesh from me, and I was temping in a cubicle farm in suburban Portland, just to keep myself in the system. A gambling acquaintance of mine was in hot water with the same bookie who had taken my Stockdale bet. Over the span of several wagers, he’d lost his shirt on three costly and ill-advised bets: 1) That Todd Marinovich would make a miracle comeback and win NFL MVP (he had one brilliant game–and then washed out of the league by season’s end); 2) That the Portland Trail Blazers would hold Michael Jordan to 7 points per game in the ’92 NBA Finals (He averaged 35.8); and 3) …I don’t know the details, but it was a fairly convoluted over-under on the number of commercial buildings that would be burned to the ground in the Los Angeles riots–it had to be “to the ground”; they couldn’t just be partially burned and uninhabitable, and they didn’t count if a gas explosion caused their destruction. Kind of a sucker’s bet, if I remember correctly.

In any event, my friend was in deep financial peril, and was looking to liquidate anything he could to pay his debts. I’m not one to profit from another’s misery, but I knew a way I could help him out–and gain what would supplant my Gerry Ferraro baseball jacket as my Most Cherished Possession.

My friend was a sports car man. He loved Ferraris. The big pony in his stable was a gorgeous 1984 Ferrari Mondial Quattrovalvole Coupe. It was stunning, and I wanted it–not because I liked sports cars. I didn’t.

But this one I wanted, and after he took my obscenely-low asking price of $11,000 (most of what was left of my Stockdale winnings), I found a local freelance jeweler and metalsmith to drop his mask, fire up his torch, and turn this into my Dream Machine. For $1,893.75, I had him take every “Ferrari Mondial” emblem and transform it into…..yes, “Ferraro-Mondale”. I even ponied up a little extra for a “1984 Ferraro” vanity plate (and the rest of my Stockdale winnings went for that, because Oregon license plates only allow for six characters, so I had to pay a guy who paid a guy who paid a guy to get it done for me. But it was worth it).

Good heavens, it was a thing of beauty. I cherished that car. I kept it covered, installed the best alarm money could buy, and even thought about inserting razor blades under the door handles lest anyone find a way to circumvent the alarm. I sent pictures of me posing beside it to everyone in the “liberal” media I could think of (but no one published) and, of course, to Gerry. I never heard anything back, and her lawyers eventually told me to back off after I drove it across country to New York to show it to her.

But it’s gone now. In a bit of serendipity not uncommon in the gambling world, I got my own self in hot water with the same bookmaker when I placed a bet in 1993 that party up-and-comer, Illinois Congressman Mel Reynolds, would be Albert Gore’s running mate in 2000. I was a little cocky after my prescience on the Stockdale bet and was sure I couldn’t lose, and that, though this was years out, it was a sure bet and would add a nice layer of winter fat to my retirement fund.

Unfortunately, Mel was charged with several sex crimes for sleeping with a 16-year-old campaign worker, and was eventually sentenced to 42 months in prison. I had fallen on lean times by this point and had to sell the car to pay my gambling arrears.

And my other prized possession–my Gerry baseball jacket–is gone, too. One careless and inebriated evening, I foolishly left it on the back of my leather Damark High-Back office chair, and it slipped off and onto a space heater, and suffered a sad, melted end. The space heater was also ruined.

But, like Gerry, both of them live on in my heart. And I still believe, now more than ever, that the Office of the Vice President would be a better place if she’d had the chance to grace it with her sharp, savvy, rock-hard and razor-sharp feminine dignity.

In the first place, I never played the gender card on Hillary. The headline was a harmless play on the Granite State motto. She cried, or almost cried. My only point was that, after years portraying herself as a soulless, castrating robot, she actually showed real human emotion for one of the first times in her public life. Bravo! Crying–that’s what humans do. I’ve publicly admitted more than once that I welled up at the end of “Terms Of Endearment” and the series finale of “Six Feet Under”. So let’s just put that charge to bed right now.

But as I said, that shuriken comes out of nowhere and gets impaled in my forehead a lot more often than it should. There was the ultra-feminist I dated in the 90s–for three years mind you. If I’m such a relentless barefoot-and-pregnant ogre, how did we stay together three years? We had our arguments, but only once did I even remotely cross the line and do anything that could be considered chauvinistic (It was an argument about language, and she insisted that the word “history” is etymologically sexist. I was a little buzzed and in the mood to punch her buttons, so I told her that was ludicrous and that I thought she was being “hersterical”. She squirted me in the face with Sriracha and went and stayed at her lesbian carpenter friend’s house for three days. I’m man enough to admit that I probably deserved a couple hours in the doghouse for that one–but three days, and Sriracha? Jesus.)

And any woman in my life who’s ever seen my CD collection wouldn’t dare call me sexist–yet they still do. Sure, I’ve long since sold most of them, but in the late 90s, during the whole Lilith Fair “Menstrualpalooza” fad (okay, that might have been another step over the line–I once referred to Lilith Fair as a “traveling menstrual show” to a girl at a First Thursday gathering. That one just got me called an asshole), I had Shawn Colvin, Sarah McLachlan, Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega–I even owned Joan Osbourne and Paula-fucking-Cole! What kind of a “sexist miscreant” owns a Paula Cole CD??? (I traded it and the Joan for $3 in credit, which I put towards Outkast’s “Stankonia”) .

If you want a real laugh, one of these days I’ll post my divorce papers from my ex-wife, DeeDee. Read those and you’d think I was Phil Spector. One choice nugget had me “demanding I clean his soiled laundry”. First, I did the laundry most of the time, and once–just once–I asked her if she could get my shirt clean. It was my favorite shirt, and it wasn’t “soiled”; it had a lot of blood on it and I couldn’t get it out with Spray-N-Wash, so I thought maybe she could take a whack at it–maybe she knew some old wives’ treatment that I didn’t. (It was a lavender pastel short-sleeve button-down. I was watching a Packers game in a tavern in Springfield, Oregon, and I hate Green Bay, so during a particularly-intimate pile after a kickoff return, I said out loud, “I guess that’s why they call them ‘the Packers.’” And this idiot meatball in a Skil trucker’s cap and a Dorsey Levens jersey makes a comment about my “fag” shirt. I said I didn’t put much stock in a sexual-orientation assessment from someone who developed his GayDar face-down on the shower tile in the county lockup–which, in a tavern in Springfield, was probably a pretty stupid thing to say. When I came to, I was in a dumpster out behind the bar, and my shirt was covered in blood–”soiled” makes me sound like I shat myself).

But then there was the Gerry Ferraro thing. I was pretty excited when Mondale picked her in ’84 ( I was so terrified that it would be racially self-righteous “Kill Whitey” Demo also-ran, Jesse Jackson). It wasn’t until I saw her speaking outside of Carson Hall on the U of Oregon campus in October of 1984 that I was smitten (never mind that the retarded kid who scraped the trays in the Carson Dining Hall was standing behind me, shouting with retard strength, “Bow-eeeeeeee! David Bow-eeeeeeeeeeeeee!” ["China Girl" was still in heavy rotation on MTV at this point]). She was my Mrs. Robinson. My Anne Bancroft. My smoky-voiced, super-sexy Lauren Bacall, and she was in pole position to become the first female Vice President in U.S. history. I don’t care if she was old enough to be my young grandmother, at that moment there was nothing sexier than a powerful, tough-as-nails, hard-spoken woman who could become the second-most powerful person in the world (yes, the Cold War was still on, but Constantin Chernenko was already circling the drain and couldn’t carry the American Vice President’s jock). She was the new It Girl in my life (although the David Bowie thing was a little creepy, in retrospect).

Which brings me to the divorce papers: All I told DeeDee was that I thought it would be cute if she got a bob. That’s all. I never said I wouldn’t have intercourse with her if she didn’t get a Gerry Ferraro haircut. That was a lie. I mean, it would have been a lot sexier than that stupid albino peroxide thing she had going on that she called her “Daryl Hannah” (she looked like Edgar Winter), but I didn’t make any demands or anything.

Anyway, that was my bad. You shouldn’t marry a woman you meet throwing up in the parking lot of an OTB. But screw her if she thinks she can make my admiration for Gerry a bad thing. And, sure, I’ve got a little crush, but why not? She’s the only woman ever to win the Vice Presidential nomination. She’s the only woman to have a spot that high on any ticket (unless you count Lenora Fulani, who ran on the ticket of one of those parties you register from a form in the back of an alternative newsweekly, and she won about 136 votes from seven states over several elections). Anyway, more about me and Gerry tomorrow.