ISU graduates’ ‘Bland Ambition’ reignites with 2024 vice presidential debate

Typically, people eager to watch a vice presidential debate on television are like football fans watching the final rounds of the NFL Draft on cable sports networks.

Hardcore political geeks like me.

But little has been normal in politics over the last decade. Above is below. Bad ideas suddenly become good ideas. Conventional wisdom is considered irrational.

That’s why Tuesday night’s 90-minute duel at 9 p.m. on CBS between Republican Sen. JD Vance (former President Donald Trump’s running mate) and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz (No. 2 to Vice President Kamala Harris) is relevant to a broader audience than in the past VP debates.

A main reason for this is that there is no rematch debate scheduled between front-runners Harris and Trump. They met in Philadelphia on September 10, when Harris delivered a methodical message and incited Trump. The former president declined an invitation to an Oct. 23 rematch with Harris.

“That might give something [Tuesday’s VP debate] a little more attention,” said Steve Tally, author of 1992’s “Bland Ambition: From Adams to Quayle – The Spinners, Criminals, Tax Cheats and Golfers Who Made It to Vice President.” “There is [Vance and Walz] the final word at the national level.”

One glaring misstep or forceful retort could swing the momentum for Harris or Trump in what appears to be a tight presidential race.

Tally has kept an eye on presidential and vice-presidential politics since his book “Bland Ambition” was published by Harcourt 32 years ago. His opinion on vice presidential candidates is often sought by journalists around election time. The Baltimore Sun hilariously dubbed Tally the “cicada of the election year.”

He remained a keen observer of the world. His Hoosier roots shaped his perspective.

Tally grew up in Greene County and graduated from Bloomfield High School in 1977 before earning a degree in microbiology from Indiana State University. He also worked as a part-time humor columnist for the Tribune-Star from 1983 to 1984 and also won several magazine writing contests. This exposure paved the way for a massive cultural shift as Tally went from being a rural-raised student at a public college in the Midwest to becoming a writer for Esquire Magazine on Park Avenue in New York City.

Eventually, Tally returned to Indiana and settled with his wife in West Lafayette, where he worked as a science reporter for the Purdue University News Service for 33 years. Now 65, he recently retired and has been thinking about writing more books, including an updated edition of “Bland Ambition.”

“We’ve had some really interesting vice presidents come along since the book was published,” Tally said.

That list includes Al Gore (with Bill Clinton) and Joe Biden (with Barack Obama), both of whom Tally counts as more conventional vice presidents who largely represented the messages of their presidents. The “outliers” of recent vice presidents have been Dick Cheney (of George Bush) and Mike Pence (of Trump), given that Cheney held extraordinary authority in the Iraq War and that Pence’s fundamentalist style contrasted so strongly with Trump’s.

Gore, Biden, Cheney and Pence joined an unusual list in history that Tally is happy to revisit. “There are almost all fascinating stories,” Tally said.

Instead of picking a favorite among America’s 49 vice presidents, Tally prefers to pick a few favorite characters from the group.

His standout vice presidential lineup begins with one of Indiana’s six vice presidents (only New York has more, with 11), Thomas Marshall, who served under President Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1921. Marshall could have ascended to the presidency when Wilson became frail, but he resisted because he believed it would cause too much turmoil in the country, Tally explained.

Imagine such a 21st century politician.

Tally is also a fan of Theodore Roosevelt, who briefly served as vice president before moving to the Oval Office after the assassination of William McKinley in 1901.

A strange guy is also on Tally’s top list: Hannibal Hamlin, who was Abraham Lincoln’s lesser-known first vice president from 1861 to 1865 and “a terrible vice president,” Tally said, with one major exception.

Hamlin was upset that Lincoln had been excluded from Cabinet meetings and eventually left Washington for his home state of Maine, where he served as a private in the U.S. Coast Guard during the Civil War. But Hamlin was also strongly opposed to slavery, and his stance led Lincoln to become more committed to the cause.

And then there is Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president from 1953 to 1961 and future president. “He had such strong good and bad qualities wrapped up in one sad person,” Tally said.

The next potential vice presidents are Walz, Minnesota governor since 2019 and a former congressman, and JD Vance, barely two years into his first term in public office, a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio. Vance would be the least experienced vice president in history, Tally said.

Walz, along with Harris, took the “happy warrior” approach, while Vance went on the attack on Trump’s behalf. Tally expects both of them to support the policies of their presidential candidates and be their bulldogs.

“Walz will give him a little more humor and a sharper knife,” Tally said. “Vance has a tendency to attack with a sledgehammer.”

The victorious vice president’s life story could be part of Tally’s updated “Bland Ambition.” He wonders how this modernized version will be received.

“I made fun of everyone, and generally people went along with it and got the joke,” Tally said, “but I don’t know if people would react the same way.”

He hopes Americans still have a political sense of humor and that media outlets like “The Daily Show” inspire him. Tally could test the waters before revising Bland Ambition and writing other political books.

“I want to kind of gauge the mood in the political world,” Tally said, “and see if there’s room for this kind of book.”

1992 seems so quaint to me now.