Riddle of vice presidents and the elusive throne

• The choice of V-P is often of strategic importance to the president.
• 65-year-old Joe Biden is meant to address and redress the displeasing issue of Obama’s inexperience.
• Because the Republican running mate is a woman, she could help McCain become President by attracting and winning over the estimated 13 million women who wanted Democrat Hillary Clinton to be President.

Well, let us look at Obama’s choice of running mate. Sixty-five-year-old Joe Biden is meant to address and redress the displeasing issue of the Democrat’s inexperience.

When Biden went to Washington as a senator, 47-year-old Obama was not yet a teenager.

Biden is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and therefore a boost to the Obama team because the Illinois Senator is also considered weak in foreign policy when compared to McCain.

This is exactly what the little known Texas Governor George W. Bush the was addressing almost eight years ago when he named experienced and older Dick Cheney his Vice-President.

Now McCain turned 72 on Friday and on the same day he named 44-year-old Mrs Sarah Palin his running mate.

Because she is a woman, she could help McCain become President by attracting and winning over the estimated 13 million women who wanted Democrat Hillary Clinton to be President.

Because she is tough as nails and has run against her own Republican establishment in Alaska and won, McCain hopes she will excite the Republican right as principled and the left as ready to take on and help shake up Washington.

Fifth, a V-P’s next career move is very dependent on her boss’ performance. A disastrous performance by the president will sink the career of the V-P no matter how hard she tries to distance herself from the former boss.

Luckily for Cheney he is not running for president. If he were, he would be hammered by the Democrats for all of Bush’s failures; they would now be his own.

If he were running and won as did Bush the elder, he would find it tough getting re-elected because after 12 years of rule by one party, the fatigue factor and therefore need for change would begin to take centre stage among the populace.

Here at home, irrespective of how the President exits the scene, Vice-President Kalonzo Musyoka’s name will be on the next presidential ballot.

His opponents will portray him as the man who denied ODM a decisive victory last year.

This, they will say, was achieved by him abandoning ODM and throwing his weight behind President Kibaki for which he was rewarded with the Vice-Presidency.

The only favourable characteristic about the vice presidency is that if the president dies or is incapacitated, then the V-P would stand a good chance of becoming president.

When this happens the V-P wears a mourner’s face while privately plotting aggressively to ensure that she would not go down in history as the person who served as acting president.