Is Political Star John Edwards Consigning Himself to Traditional V-P Oblivion?

John Edwards can't get the high-beam smile off his face.

Picked this week as putative Democratic candidate John Kerry's running mate, his joy at the notion of becoming U.S. vice-president fairly leaps off the TV screen.

But has the junior senator from North Carolina thought it through?

He's important now. Some say his open-faced affability is, in fact, crucial if Kerry's so-far plodding campaign is ever to catch fire. But if the Democrats win Nov. 2, what then?

Will Edwards step in to the second most important job in the land, a heartbeat away from the presidency? Or, having served his purpose, will he be at a political dead end?

The first American vice-president, John Adams, called the job"the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Rather more succinct was one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's three vice-presidents, John Nance Garner, who bitterly remarked that it"isn't worth a pitcher of warm spit."

That's been the case more often than not.

It's widely acknowledged that a vice-president has a far more significant role before the election, not after, hence the term, running mate.

He's expected to broaden the appeal of the main contender, not overshadow it because it's the top of the ticket that people vote for, analysts say, not the bottom. And Kerry's choice of a running mate is textbook. Edwards' blue-collar southern roots and trial-lawyer speechifying will counterpoint the Massachusetts senator's own blue-blood East Coast dispassion.

U.S. President George W. Bush also needed a counterpoint when he chose Dick Cheney in 2000, and almost certainly will do so again next month. Cheney, secretary of defence in George H.W. Bush's administration and ultimate Washington insider, added ballast to Bush's inexperience at the federal level.

Presidential historian Allan Lichtman notes it's a myth that running mates are picked to balance the ticket geographically or to deliver a key state or region. It rarely happens because it rarely works."Only Lyndon Johnson did that, back in 1960, when he was credited with winning Texas for John F. Kennedy."

Traditionally, once past the inauguration, vice-presidents are more or less sidelined, limited to attending the funerals of foreign dignitaries, playing host to less important White House visitors and chairing the occasional commission. Indeed, the role has only two officially mandated duties. The first is to serve as president of the Senate, though the V-P may vote only when there is a tie. Someone else actually runs it on a day-to-day basis.

The second is to succeed if the president dies or resigns, as in 1974 when Gerald Ford took over from the disgraced Richard Nixon. Nine of the 46 U.S. vice-presidents have replaced their boss before the end of his term, a fact that apparently enticed Johnson to sign on with Kennedy.

"Lots of presidents die in office," he noted in graceless foreshadowing,"so why not?"

The vice-president does attend cabinet meetings and sits on the National Security Council, the president's chief advisory panel on foreign relations and national defence policies.

That's only because of Harry Truman; as Roosevelt's third V-P, he was kept so far out of the loop that he knew nothing about testing of the atomic bomb. When he took office on FDR's death in 1945, with war in the Pacific still raging, Truman vowed no vice-president would ever be so ill-prepared again....