The vice presidency was considered so insignificant during John Adams's day that he referred to the incumbent as, "His Superfluous Excellency."
Daniel Webster declined the nomination as Zachary Taylor's running mate, saying, "I do not choose to be buried until I am really dead."
When asked to name an idea Vice President Richard Nixon had contributed to his administration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded, "If you give me a week, I might think of one."
After standing mute during much of the 1992 Vice Presidential Debate while Al Gore and Dan Quayle exchanged pleasantries, Reform Party candidate James Stockdale commented, "I feel like I'm a spectator at a ping-pong game."
Riddle me this... Test your knowledge of the vice presidency:
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Things we've wondered about...
What is the vice president actually supposed to do?
Why did Abraham Lincoln's vice president spend most of his tenure in Maine ?
Is it true that Tipper Gore actually nodded off during the deadly VP debate of 1996 between her husband and Jack Kemp?
Resources
Information used for this Trivia page came from the following primary sources:
Marie D. Natoli. American Prince, American Pauper: The Contemporary Vice Presidency in Perspective (Greenwood Press, 1985).
Sidney Kraus. Televised Presidential Debates and Public Policy, Second Ed. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000).
Alan Schroeder. Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV (Columbia University Press, 2000).
Links
For more information about the vice presidency and the vice presidential debates, visit:
