Jun 3, 2015 3 min read

In a column that appeared on Wednesday’s editorial page, Pennsylvania political sages G. Terry Madonna and Michael L. Young point out Rick Santorum, a U.S. senator representing the commonwealth from 1995 to 2007, is running for president again in 2016 not because he has any realistic hope of winning the Republican nomination, but he perhaps hopes to get the second slot on the ticket.

They argue Santorum is “one of the shrewdest, most tenacious and ambitious politicians of his generation. He really wants to be president, and his best path might be the vice presidency.”

That a vice president is the proverbial “heartbeat away” from the world’s most demanding, multi-faceted job means it shouldn’t be taken lightly. In a world full of dangers and complexity, the days are gone when someone like Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president, could show up in Washington, D.C., be sworn in, and then repair to his home in Maine, barely to be seen or heard from again; or when Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s second-in-command, could exhort visitors to toss peanuts at him as they walked by his office on tours of the Capitol. Indeed, nine vice presidents had to step into the presidency over the course of the country’s history – 20 percent of the total.

But here’s where we can take some comfort – it hasn’t happened for almost 41 years, since Gerald Ford became president in August 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned because of the, um, gathering unpleasantness of the Watergate scandal. Before then, from 1841 to 1963, it was a roughly once-per-generation occurrence, with four sitting presidents being assassinated and four succumbing to natural causes.

We’ve learned hard lessons on keeping our presidents and other public officials safe thanks to the missteps and oversights that contributed to the killing of John F. Kennedy, as well as his predecessors who were slain in office. We marvel now at how Lincoln was left so vulnerable at Ford’s Theatre, just a few days after the end of a war that left the nation bitterly torn.

Our presidents now also receive top-notch medical care. Gone are the days when a president’s physicians would shrug off an average blood pressure reading of 206/118, as Franklin Roosevelt’s doctors did. And we also know more nowadays about the health of a prospective president than we did even 50 or 60 years ago – it’s not likely that a president having Addison’s disease, which plagued Kennedy, would now remain a secret. The steep decline in Roosevelt’s health in the lead-up to the 1944 presidential election, which had him looking wraithlike and enervated, would have been impossible to overlook or downplay in the contemporary 24/7 news cycle.

Even vice presidents who sought the presidency on their own in recent times haven’t had much luck – Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush are the only two in the last century who have gone on to win the White House, while the likes of Al Gore, Dan Quayle, Walter Mondale, Alben Barkley, Henry Wallace and Hubert Humphrey came up short.

Yes, there’s always a chance a vice president could end up sitting in the Oval Office because of the death, resignation or incapacity of his or her boss. But the chances seem a lot smaller than they once were. That’s something all Americans, no matter their political persuasion, can be glad about.