History Main / VicePresidentWho

** UsefulNotes/TonyBlair's deputy PM John Prescott was given the non-job as a sop to the traditionalist wing of the Labour Party, as a token working-class hero, and as the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party which is expected to be a cabinet minister. In practice, he was a powerless figure of fun used to deflect criticism away from the ''real'' power base. Succeeding PM UsefulNotes/GordonBrown didn't even bother with a deputy PM, although in the final year of his premiership he did appoint UsefulNotes/PeterMandelson as First Secretary of State, a position which is basically "Deputy Prime Minister in all but name", Mandelson being very much an aversion of this trope.

** UsefulNotes/KamalaHarris was stuck in this position for much of her first term. Despite making waves after being the first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president, approval ratings for her steeply dropped even moreso compared to her President UsefulNotes/JoeBiden. Granted, Biden had to take in a lot due to political polarization, economic troubles, and mass shootings that had become worse after the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic and 2020 Election, and also was a much calmer and peaceful president when compared to his predecessor. Harris, however, never really had a defined role outside of casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate. Her public image was also marred by allegations of high staff turnover rates and bigoted personal attacks. That said, she eventually found her footing after the overturning of abortion rights as where she worked as a campaign surrogate and intermediary with reproductive rights activists.

** With her first term coming to an end, UsefulNotes/KamalaHarris seems to be heading in this direction. Despite making waves after being the first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president, approval ratings for her steeply dropped. It didn't help that her President UsefulNotes/JoeBiden had to take in a lot due to political polarization, economic troubles, and mass shootings had become worse after the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic and 2020 Election, and also was a much calmer and peaceful president when compared to his predecessor. Harris, however, never really had a defined role and didn't stand out aside from casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate. That said, she eventually found her footing after the overturning of abortion rights as where she worked as a campaign surrogate and intermediary with reproductive rights activists.

-->"Before Cheney, discussion about the vice presidency focused on how to make the office stronger, more effective. [[BewareTheQuietOnes Not any more.]]"

** With her first term coming to an end, UsefulNotes/KamalaHarris seems to be heading in this direction. Despite making waves after being the first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president, approval ratings for her steeply dropped. It didn't help that her President UsefulNotes/JoeBiden had to take in a lot due to political polarization, economic troubles, and mass shootings had become worse after the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic and 2020 Election, and also was a much calmer and peaceful president when compared to his predecessor. Kamala, on the other hand, was widely disliked by members of both sides. Republicans thought she was a diversity hire who was ineffective at her job and had a spotty track record, while Democrats thought she was only elected to get the Black votes and questioned her past as the DA for San Francisco included a history of arresting a lot of Black and LGBT citizens for minor crimes. Her awkward public speaking skills didn't help either, as she was criticized for having a condescending tone and nasally voice that didn't have any charisma or warmth to it. While she does have less then a year remaining, it's clear that the hype built up for her role definitely didn't pay off.

** With her first term coming to an end, UsefulNotes/KamalaHarris seems to be heading in this direction. Despite making waves after being the first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president, approval ratings for her steeply dropped. It didn't help that her President UsefulNotes/JoeBiden had to take in a lot due to political polarization, economic troubles, and mass shootings had become worse after the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic and 2020 Election, and also was a much calmer and peaceful president when compared to his predecessor. Kamala, on the other hand, was widely disliked by members of both sides. Republicans thought she was a diversity hire who was ineffective at her job and had a spotty track record, while Democrats thought she was only elected to get the Black votes and questioned her past as the DA for San Francisco included a history of arresting a lot of Black and LGBT citizens for minor crimes. Her awkward public speaking skills didn't help either, as she was criticized for having a condescending tone and nasally voice that didn't have any charisma or warmth to it. While she does have a year remaining, it's clear that the hype built up for her role definitely didn't pay off.

-->-- Commonly attributed to UsefulNotes/WoodrowWilson's Vice President '''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_R._Marshall Thomas R. Marshall]]'''[[note]]Never heard of him? [[AppealToObscurity This just proves the point.]][[/note]]

* In ''[[Videogame/SamAndMaxFreelancePolice Sam and Max: Abe Lincoln Must Die!]]'', if Sam examines the potted plant found in the Oval Office:

* On the ''WebVideo/DreamSMP'', this is {{zigzagged}} in L'Manburg, depending on the administration in question.
** This is generally averted during the Soot administration, as Wilbur's VP, Tommy, helped L'Manburg grow by recruiting newcomers and building new structures, and took part in several side events alongside his fellow L'Manburgians. During the election, Tommy did lots of campaigning by building signs and talking with members of the SMP, had a major role during the Presidential debate, and also secured endorsements for their party, [=POG2020=].
** During the [[TyrantTakesTheHelm Schlatt administration]] of [[MeaningfulRename Manburg]], this is {{played straight}} as Quackity, who served as Schlatt's VP after pooling his votes (30%) with Schlatt's (16%), had little to no actual political power and his main role in the cabinet was to [[MrFanservice "have a fat ass"]]. This is due to [[ControlFreak Schlatt's desire to consolidate power onto himself and himself alone]], which Quackity lampshades [[spoiler:before his resignation from his position and taking Schlatt's second canon life]], when he has [[MistreatmentInducedBetrayal had enough of]] [[DomesticAbuse Schlatt's abuse]] and ControlFreak tendencies.
** Under the Tubbo administration, this is played with. Tommy initially helped rebuild L'Manburg after the Manburg-Pogtopia War, but when he started to question Tubbo's leadership and suggest making more political change by banning several things (such as Americans and Australians) in the country, which Tubbo ended up vetoing. However, after Tommy gets exiled from the country under Dream's demands, Quackity took his place and regained his role as VP, and [[AvertedTrope wielded a lot more political power than he did in the previous cabinet]], being able to [[WarHawk assemble and unofficially lead the Butcher Army]] in an attempt to consolidate national power and eliminate threats to the state.

Thereafter, for much of American history, various parties chose their vice presidential nominees simply "to balance the ticket" for the comparatively trivial reasons of achieving geographic, demographic, or opinion "diversity" with presidential nominees, with little thought to their actual qualifications, because the vice presidency has no constitutional duties other than to preside over the Senate (a ceremonial task, and usually passed around among junior senators anyhow) and no constitutional powers other than taking over if the president dies/resigns (something that has only happened nine times in 230+ years of there being full-time presidents), and casting tie-breaking Senate votes (which has happened roughly 250 times, most of them before [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar the Civil War]] -- as a rule, unless they're doing it purely to make a statement, senators try not to put a bill to a vote unless there's a fairly good chance that it will pass. Additionally, the number of bills that actually pass with fewer than 60 votes has decreased in recent years due to the increased use of the filibuster, which under current rules requires 60 votes to get the bill out of debate and to an actual vote). Consequently, vice presidents are commonly portrayed as useless, ineffectual, stupid, or a combination of the above, and they become the butt of jokes. Can lead to ReassignmentBackfire when the VP succeeds to the presidency upon the president's death.

* ''Film/AirForceOne'': National Security Advisor Jack Doherty discusses this trope while being held hostage, "The Vice-President in this case is like the Queen of England. She can't even buy airline tickets without talking to someone like me."

* On the ''LetsPlay/DreamSMP'', this is {{zigzagged}} in L'Manburg, depending on the administration in question.

** UsefulNotes/SarahPalin never got to be Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter's vice president, was the first VPOTUS to have an office in the White House and [[DefiedTrope what by now became a defiance was the first real aversion of this trope]] was a big reason why. [[note]]For example, [=VPs=] running for trope. Since Mondale, the trope has been zig-zagged. George H.W. Bush (to Reagan), Al Gore (to Clinton) Dick Cheney (to George W. Bush) and elected as presidents in their own right are now more common. UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush was formerly VP to UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan, ditto for UsefulNotes/RichardNixon to UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower, and the current President Joe Biden was the former VP under Barack Obama.[[/note]] John [=McCain=] had nominated her (to Obama) are widely seen as a way to broaden his base with more right-wing Republicans, but Palin's stunning incompetence -- with the extent of her foreign policy experience being [[MemeticMutation memetically]] expressed on ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' as "I can see Russia from my house!" -- turned many people off from voting for [=McCain=] even though they preferred his policy, realizing Vice Presidents that if anything happened to him (who was not had real influence in the best of health[[note]]For what it's worth, he survived UsefulNotes/BarackObama's two-term presidency, but given the stress of the office, it's not certain that the same would have happened had he actually been president[[/note]]), she would be president. A [[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379410000442 2010 Stanford paper]] estimates that Palin cost [=McCain=] about 2 million votes.[[note]]This is White House; some regarded Cheney as TheManBehindTheMan. However, Dan Quayle's youth and malapropisms made him a ''staggering'' number target for a vice presidential candidate -- even comedians in spite of this trope, political scientists aren't big on the idea that the VP pick can affect the ticket ''that'' much. The only other VP candidates who affected that many votes in ''either'' direction were Thomas Eagleton in 1972, with George [=McGovern's=] inept handling of the situation around Eagleton's mental health issues (eventually replacing Eagleton with Sargent Shriver) utterly tanking his already-floundering campaign, and Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, the first woman to run as VP, which got Walter Mondale a lot of credibility among female voters (but still wasn't enough to beat the hugely popular UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan).[[/note]]
** UsefulNotes/MikePence swung the pendulum back to the office being less influential. H.W. Bush's administration, Mike Pence was picked as generally a compromise between the UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump campaign and the GOP. The campaign figured they needed to do something to thank the evangelical Christians who supported him non-entity in the primary and to court ones who were leery about supporting him due to his checkered history. The party wanted to get rid of him as the governor of Indiana after he had overseen two catastrophes of his own making [[note]] The first being a huge economic backlash against a "religious liberty" bill and the second an HIV outbreak in a rural part of the state when he shut down the only place in the region, a Planned Parenthood, that did needle exchanges. It was so bad that he eventually had to take the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) to get a hold on it.[[/note]] that put his own reelection bid into serious question in a solid red state since governorships are not as partisan as federal offices. Trump would keep Pence at arm's length after being elected and because of this, Pence was mostly relegated to ceremonial duties and the ''de facto'' second-in-command in the administration was Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. That being said, he until the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, and Kamala Harris has had the ''extremely'' dubious fortune to have escaped the curse of utter media/public perception blackout thanks to the Internet finding as much fun in mocking his homophobia as Trump, with early hysterical fear-mongering of him scheming to legalize electroshock conversion therapy somehow leading many to adopt the [[https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1191693-mike-pence Electric Mike]] meme. Pence would become more influential in the final days of the Trump administration. He would face a lot of opposition after Trump lost the 2020 election and would not overturn the results despite Trump desperately claiming the VP had the legal power to do so after Pence clarified he did not actually have that power, causing a breakdown been very prominent in the relationship as well as an AssassinationAttempt by those who objected to the election.
** With her first term coming to an end, UsefulNotes/KamalaHarris seems to be heading in this direction. Despite making waves after being the first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president, approval ratings for her steeply dropped. It didn't help that her President UsefulNotes/JoeBiden had to take in a lot due to political polarization, economic troubles, and mass shootings had become worse after the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic and 2020 Election, and also was a much calmer and peaceful president when compared to his predecessor. Kamala, on the other hand, was widely disliked by members of both sides. Republicans thought she was a diversity hire who was ineffective at her job and had a spotty track record, while Democrats thought she was only elected to get the Black votes and questioned her past as the DA for San Francisco included a history of arresting a lot of Black and LGBT citizens for minor crimes. Her awkward public speaking skills didn't help either, as she was criticized for having a condescending tone and nasally voice that didn't have any charisma or warmth to it. While she does have a year remaining, it's clear that the hype built up for her role definitely didn't pay off.Joe Biden's administration.

* In an episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheSylvesterAndTweetyMysteries'', Granny is called in to investigate a haunting at the White House. She apparently recognizes the Vice-President, but, when he asks how, [[{{SherlockCanRead}} she admits that she read his name tag]], which just said: "Hello, I'm Vice-President Obsequious."

* The HBO series ''Series/{{Veep}}'' is about Selina Meyer, an ineffectual, bumbling Vice-President, played by [[Creator/JuliaLouisDreyfus Julia Louis-Dreyfus]], who is ignored by the President and mocked by the media. She spends her time as veep griping about having no power and wishing she were still in the Senate. [[spoiler:Selina eventually ascends to the presidency and treats her own veep the same manner she used to be treated.]]

* Both of President Bartlet's veeps in ''Series/TheWestWing''. Bartlet and John Hoynes personally dislike each other and Bartlet barely involves Hoynes in anything important, which Hoynes resents. Like many RealLife veeps, Hoynes was one of Bartlet's biggest ''rivals'' when they were both running for President, and Bartlet only invited him to become his running mate because he knew that he couldn't win the election without the votes of Hoynes' supporters. After Hoynes was forced to resign, his replacement Robert "Bingo Bob" Russell is widely known as a bland political hack and was the only VP nominee that could get through a hostile Congress, but he tries to make himself more notable for his inevitable presidential campaign. Being an UnconventionalLearningExperience about the US government, the show demonstrates (accurately) that the White House Chief of Staff often ''really'' serves as the President's NumberTwo, despite not being an elected position.[[note]] This ends up causing some drama in Season 2 when Bartlet is briefly incapacitated by an assassination attempt, and Leo (his Chief of Staff) immediately begins acting in his stead rather than letting Hoynes take over. Toby immediately [[WhatTheHellHero points out the ethical problems with this]], reminding Bartlet that Hoynes was elected by the people to succeed the president.[[/note]]

** Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter's vice president, was the first VPOTUS to have an office in the White House and was the first real aversion of this trope. Since Mondale, the trope has been zig-zagged. George H.W. Bush (to Reagan), Al Gore (to Clinton) Dick Cheney (to George W. Bush) and Joe Biden (to Obama) are widely seen as Vice Presidents that had real influence in the White House; some regarded Cheney as TheManBehindTheMan. However, Dan Quayle's youth and malapropisms made him a target for comedians in H.W. Bush's administration, Mike Pence was generally a non-entity in the Trump administration until the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, and Kamala Harris has not been very prominent in Joe Biden's administration.

** During the 1988 campaign, UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush chose UsefulNotes/DanQuayle as his running mate. In the vice-presidential debate with Lloyd Bentsen, Quayle compared his 12 years of service in both houses of Congress to UsefulNotes/JohnFKennedy, who served 14 years in both houses before being elected president at age 43 in 1960. Bentsen retorted "Senator, [[PretenderDiss you're no Jack Kennedy]]" to Quayle. During his vice-presidency, Quayle made such blunder-filled statements as "I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future", "I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, [[ImmediateSelfContradiction but that could change]]", "You take the U.N.C.F. model that what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. [[CaptainObvious How true that is]]," and his infamous insistence that potato was supposed to be spelled "p-o-t-a-t-o-e" when attending an elementary school spelling bee.[[note]]He was "correcting" a child who had spelled the word correctly, and later blamed the school's teaching materials, which spelled the word incorrectly but he decided to go with over his own judgement.[[/note]] Quayle even described the vice presidency as "an awkward office. You're president of the Senate. You're not even officially part of the executive branch -- you're part of the legislative branch. You're paid by the Senate, not by the executive branch. And it's the president's agenda. It's not your agenda. You're going to disagree from time to time, but you salute and carry out the orders the best you can."
** UsefulNotes/AlGore zig-zagged this. For his first term as UsefulNotes/BillClinton's vice president he mostly fell into the background against the more colorful and charismatic Clinton, with the few popular culture mentions that he did get mostly ridiculing him as a dullard obsessed with trivial matters. Then Clinton's impeachment and the possibility of Gore succeeding him raised his profile, continuing into his own presidential run in 2000, which resulted in him narrowly (and controversially) losing. Afterwards he fell back into obscurity for a while, overshadowed by the UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror, but came back into prominence, firstly as that war became increasingly controversial and unpopular, and more pertinently, when one of the issues he had championed during his time as VP but largely been ignored on, namely {{global warming}}, became an issue of widespread concern. Between this and his having a recurring role on ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'', Gore is considered to have had perhaps the most influential post-vice presidential career of anyone who never succeeded to the top job.
** UsefulNotes/DickCheney, vice president under UsefulNotes/GeorgeWBush, is one of the most famous subversions of this. He had already served under UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush as Secretary of Defense and had a political career of about thirty years under his belt when Bush Jr. picked him as VP in 2000--consequently he had a lot of sway over the more inexperienced president. Many political observers and historians see him as the most powerful vice president in American history, having served as TheManBehindTheMan for the power he wielded over the Bush administration's policy decisions, which included crafting the justification for the [[UsefulNotes/TheWarOnTerror war in Iraq]] and the Bush administration's policies on [[BigBrotherIsWatching warrantless surveillance]] and EnhancedInterrogationTechniques (and keeping Bush in the dark about their legality), shaping the administration's energy policy, expanding the power of the presidency, vetting Supreme Court nominees, [[ArsonMurderAndLifesaving and]] pressuring Bush to [[PetTheDog moderate his stance against same-sex marriage]] (as his daughter Mary was openly lesbian). While Bush did grow more assured and assertive of his authority during his second term, Cheney was still a highly influential figure in the White House. Then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert even secured an office for Cheney in the United States Capitol to go along with the one normally afforded to the president, in recognition of his power. To quote [[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99422633 this story]] from Creator/{{NPR}}:
-->"Before Cheney, discussion about the vice presidency focused on how to make the office stronger, more effective. [[BewareTheQuietOnes Not any more.]]"
** UsefulNotes/SarahPalin never got to be vice president, and [[DefiedTrope what by now became a defiance of this trope]] was a big reason why. [[note]]For example, [=VPs=] running for and elected as presidents in their own right are now more common. UsefulNotes/GeorgeHWBush was formerly VP to UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan, ditto for UsefulNotes/RichardNixon to UsefulNotes/DwightDEisenhower, and the current President Joe Biden was the former VP under Barack Obama.[[/note]] John [=McCain=] had nominated her as a way to broaden his base with more right-wing Republicans, but Palin's stunning incompetence -- with the extent of her foreign policy experience being [[MemeticMutation memetically]] expressed on ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' as "I can see Russia from my house!" -- turned many people off from voting for [=McCain=] even though they preferred his policy, realizing that if anything happened to him (who was not in the best of health[[note]]For what it's worth, he survived UsefulNotes/BarackObama's two-term presidency, but given the stress of the office, it's not certain that the same would have happened had he actually been president[[/note]]), she would be president. A [[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379410000442 2010 Stanford paper]] estimates that Palin cost [=McCain=] about 2 million votes.[[note]]This is a ''staggering'' number for a vice presidential candidate -- even in spite of this trope, political scientists aren't big on the idea that the VP pick can affect the ticket ''that'' much. The only other VP candidates who affected that many votes in ''either'' direction were Thomas Eagleton in 1972, with George [=McGovern's=] inept handling of the situation around Eagleton's mental health issues (eventually replacing Eagleton with Sargent Shriver) utterly tanking his already-floundering campaign, and Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, the first woman to run as VP, which got Walter Mondale a lot of credibility among female voters (but still wasn't enough to beat the hugely popular UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan).[[/note]]
** UsefulNotes/MikePence swung the pendulum back to the office being less influential. Pence was picked as a compromise between the UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump campaign and the GOP. The campaign figured they needed to do something to thank the evangelical Christians who supported him in the primary and to court ones who were leery about supporting him due to his checkered history. The party wanted to get rid of him as the governor of Indiana after he had overseen two catastrophes of his own making [[note]] The first being a huge economic backlash against a "religious liberty" bill and the second an HIV outbreak in a rural part of the state when he shut down the only place in the region, a Planned Parenthood, that did needle exchanges. It was so bad that he eventually had to take the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) to get a hold on it.[[/note]] that put his own reelection bid into serious question in a solid red state since governorships are not as partisan as federal offices. Trump would keep Pence at arm's length after being elected and because of this, Pence was mostly relegated to ceremonial duties and the ''de facto'' second-in-command in the administration was Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. That being said, he has had the ''extremely'' dubious fortune to have escaped the curse of utter media/public perception blackout thanks to the Internet finding as much fun in mocking his homophobia as Trump, with early hysterical fear-mongering of him scheming to legalize electroshock conversion therapy somehow leading many to adopt the [[https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1191693-mike-pence Electric Mike]] meme. Pence would become more influential in the final days of the Trump administration. He would face a lot of opposition after Trump lost the 2020 election and would not overturn the results despite Trump desperately claiming the VP had the legal power to do so after Pence clarified he did not actually have that power, causing a breakdown in the relationship as well as an AssassinationAttempt by those who objected to the election.
** With her first term coming to an end, UsefulNotes/KamalaHarris seems to be heading in this direction. Despite making waves after being the first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, and the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president, approval ratings for her steeply dropped. It didn't help that her President UsefulNotes/JoeBiden had to take in a lot due to political polarization, economic troubles, and mass shootings had become worse after the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic and 2020 Election, and also was a much calmer and peaceful president when compared to his predecessor. Kamala, on the other hand, was widely disliked by members of both sides. Republicans thought she was a diversity hire who was ineffective at her job and had a spotty track record, while Democrats thought she was only elected to get the Black votes and questioned her past as the DA for San Francisco included a history of arresting a lot of Black and LGBT citizens for minor crimes. Her awkward public speaking skills didn't help either, as she was criticized for having a condescending tone and nasally voice that didn't have any charisma or warmth to it. While she does have a year remaining, it's clear that the hype built up for her role definitely didn't pay off.