Every four years there are certain stories/columns that it seems are fated to be written. There is the ever-popular and breathless tale of how, if the chips fall a certain way, that “we might have a brokered convention,” and there is the required “third party candidate story” (see last week’s cover story at Newsweek for the latest example there). Another is the “dramatic VP choice” story that we usually don’t have to endure until it is clear who the nominees will be.

James Joyner identifies the latest of the VP variety, with Bill Kristol’s call for Joe Lieberman to be the GOP nominee’s veep choice.

This is, of course, silly. Not only, as Joyner notes, “it makes no sense to chose a backup quarterback who would install an entirely different domestic policy game plan were the starter to go out,” but the notion that a dramatic VP nominee is going to sway voters is simply incorrect. We go through this every year, while there is some buzz to be generated by a vice presidential pick, to be sure, but at the end of the day I am wholly unconvinced that the selection really matters. Indeed, the last time (and perhaps one of the only times in US electoral history) that a VP nominee mattered was in 1960, when JFK’s victory over Nixon was probably secured by LBJ’s formidable political machine in the state of Texas.

One of the worst VP picks in recent memory was that of Dan Quayle by George H. W. Bush in 1988, however, Bush bested Dukakis and his more impressive choice of Lloyd Bentsen. One guesses that had the contest been between the veeps alone, Bentsen would have been President of th United States.