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WASHINGTON --- The supposed short lists for potential vice presidential nominees in both parties suggest a certain end of a 16-year run for a particular political species in the vice president's office - the Washington elder statesman with vast experience on Capitol Hill.
As different as they are ideologically and personally, Joseph Biden and Dick Cheney got plucked for the No. 2 job not because they provided any key electoral map leverage - their home states, Delaware and Wyoming, have just three electoral votes each - but because their longtime contacts in Congress and their deep knowledge of global leaders were a help in governing.
Among today's Democratic contenders for vice president are Sens. Timothy M. Kaine, D-Va., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., both of whom have just 3 1/2 years under their belt in the Senate; Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez, an accomplished lawyer whose highest elective office was four years on the Montgomery County Council in Maryland; and Housing Secretary Julián Castro, in that post less than two years and previously San Antonio mayor.
The Republican shortlist is topped by three familiar figures but ones whose experience dealing with legislative bodies is mixed: Newt Gingrich, whose four-year run as House speaker included multiple coup attempts by his own party; Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, whose 12 years in the House were marked by taking strident positions against his party leadership; and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who famously ended a negotiation session with Democratic legislators by going home to order pizza.
Biden was 64 when President Obama asked him to be his running mate eight years ago. He had spent 36 years as a senator, including a dozen years as the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. Cheney was 59 when George W. Bush asked him to serve, having logged a 30-year career in politics that included stints as White House chief of staff, a congressman for a decade and secretary of defense.
As vice president, Biden served as a go-to deal-maker, particularly with Senate Republicans who barely knew Obama but trusted his vice president. In an event last fall with former vice president Walter Mondale - who also had long service in the Senate - Biden said that he carved a similar role to Mondale's four years as the last man to talk over key issues with Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor with no Washington experience before his presidency.
Cheney became a more controversial figure in Congress because he was viewed as a sharp partisan who ignored Democrats and pushed his administration deep into the Iraq War. In his early years, however, Bush dispatched him to try to settle disputes on matters such as techniques used to interrogate terrorism suspects.
Every Tuesday that he was in Washington, when Senate Republicans convened for their weekly policy luncheon, Cheney took a seat at a far table. He rarely spoke, but senators used the opportunity to get in a few words, on everything from global to parochial matters.
Congressional veterans often prefer such an emissary to Capitol Hill, someone they can count on to deliver messages that are sometimes difficult to send directly to the leader of the free world.
"What I would urge our nominee is to pick somebody who would do the best to help her in dealing with the Congress," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., the longest-serving current senator, said in a recent interview. He cited Mondale, who served 12 years in the Senate before Jimmy Carter chose him, and George H.W. Bush, a former congressman and CIA director before Ronald Reagan selected him, as perfect models for the vice-presidential role as helping to govern.
"I don't know if either one of them made much difference in the general election, but they made a huge difference in their relationship" with Congress," Leahy said of Mondale and Bush.
It is not surprising that in an era where outsiders with anti-establishment credentials tend to overperform with an angry electorate, the potential running mates lack résumés that look anything like Biden's or Cheney's.
Clinton, in particular, is such a Washington figure, after 25 years in the national spotlight, that she faces pressure to find a fresh face. One telling example of how much times have changed is Kaine's situation; today he is considered Clinton's safe choice, when eight years ago he was a risky pick for Obama.
He became Virginia's lieutenant governor in 2002 and then governor in 2006. Kaine, now 58, was on Obama's final list, but he had no foreign-affairs experience, and that presented a potential weakness when matched with Obama's own brief tenure in the Senate. Obama picked Biden.
Now, after three-plus years on the Senate's Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, Kaine is presented as the old hand compared with the competition.
Trump, after running a brutal campaign against the GOP establishment, finds himself searching for party unity and thinking an insider would help him.
"I don't need two anti-establishment people," Trump told The Washington Post's Fix blog in an interview Monday. "Someone respected by the establishment and liked by the establishment would be good for unification."
But the insiders with good, bipartisan reputations in Congress, including Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the current Foreign Relations Committee chairman, withdrew from consideration. So Trump is left mostly with iconoclasts with uneven track records on Capitol Hill.
Gingrich's unsteady stewardship of the House led to his ouster at the hands of his own party in 1998 after four tumultuous years as speaker.
Pence was popular among Christian conservative activists but not with his colleagues. When Republicans lost the House majority in 2006, Pence challenged John A. Boehner of Ohio for the job of minority leader. The outcome was so embarrassing - 168 votes for Boehner, 27 for Pence - that House Republicans decided from then on never to release vote totals in leadership races. After a two-year stint in a lower-level leadership post, Pence returned to the rank and file and ran for governor in 2012.
In 2014, Republicans ousted Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the first senator to endorse Trump who is in the vice-presidential mix, from his post atop the Budget Committee. Republicans had more trust in Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, whose seniority was based on drawing straws when the two senators arrived together in 1997.
Whoever the choices are, they will mark a turn from the Biden-Cheney years.
Previously:
• 05/02/16: Is the 2016 election about to change again? Dem Schumer, a one-man super PAC?
• 03/31/16: And now for some good newsCan Trump become so unpopular that Dems take back the House?
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