| fkusumot said: The best ticket would be McCain/Obama, or Clinton/McCain. Too bad that kind of craziness can't happen. It would be nice if we elected the President and Vice-President on separate votes, as the Constitution originally stated. |
The constitution as originally written did not have a separate vote for VP - the top vote getter got President, runner up got VP. This was also written at a time when it was believed (hoped) we would not have political parties, a notion that didn't survive the Washington administration.
Our 3rd election resulted in a VP (Jefferson) who actively worked to undermine the policies of the President (Adams) because they were from separate parties and had different views on where the country should go (which is why the split party tickets you propose would be unworkable). Thankfully this practice stopped, else we might have started to see assassination as a more frequent method to grab power.
Our 4th election was even worse, as Jefferson ran with Burr, and both got the same number of electoral votes, making it unclear who should be VP (it was always intended to be Burr, but he tried to steal the vote anyway). It was this that led to the 11th Ammendment, making the VP a separate election.
