Free Republic

Trump and Biden’s ages have many wondering about their running mates’ influence and power. What is the historical precedent for a vice president’s role? “Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president,” said the great TV host Johnny Carson. “And anyone who doesn’t grow up can be vice president.”But for all the jokes about the irrelevance of the office of Veep, America has been thinking about this year’s vice presidential candidates more than most.Sen. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s running mate, has already referred to their ticket as a “Harris administration” in what many speculated was a telling Freudian...

History will judge President Clinton more favorably than President Obama, a senior Republican senator charged Wednesday evening. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a 34-year veteran of the Senate, suggested that Clinton, during his two terms in office, had a better presidency than Obama has had so far. "We've won battles through great presidential leadership," Hatch said in reference to congressional fights over spending during an appearance on Bloomberg News. "Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and even President Clinton on occasion, who, I think, will go down in history as a better president than this one." The praise for Obama's nearest Democratic...

As a boy, Harrison Tyler never gave much thought to his grandfather, John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States. "I grew up during World War II," he told Subaru Drive Magazine in 2002, "and surviving the war and the shortages was what was on everybody's mind. Being related to a president was never a thought." Such a view may seem astonishing, but President Tyler died in 1862, 66 years before his grandson was born. In fact, Harrison Tyler's father, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853 and died in 1935, so there were very few first-hand accounts of...