From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is now and then.

I'm Heather Cox Richardson and I'm Joanne Freeman.

This week we're talking about a topic that in some ways was born of our discussion recently

of the White House correspondence dinner.

What we want to talk about today is the vice presidency.

It has not necessarily been the same job over the arc of American history that it has been one or another kind of job.

And that today, as we'll see, it is a very potentially significant job.

Now that said, there's a long standing habit of people making fun of the vice presidency in one way or another as an enormously insignificant job.

So for example, at the White House correspondence dinner, the comedian Roy Wood Jr. said.

But I think the most insulting scandal to fall to the feet of the Biden administration was placed at the feet of our Madam Vice President.

The scandal of what does Kamala do?

Which is a disrespectful question.

That's a disrespectful question because nobody ever asked that question of the vice president until a woman got the job.

I'm going to ask.

I don't know what Mike Pence did. The only thing I know about Mike Pence is that he's really good at playing hard and seek at the Capitol.

You've got to be crafted to catch Mike Pence and that Capitol. You'd know all of Nixon-Pranies.

At the end of the day, as a vice president, the only thing you got to do is just be better than Dick Cheney.

That's the bar. Just be better than Dick Cheney.

Which I think is hilarious and captures some of the other ways in which former vice presidents talked about the job.

Actually two that I stumbled across and one is especially for you and I, Heather.

A former vice president commenting on the job was Woodrow Wilson's former vice president Thomas Marshall, who said.

Once there were two brothers, one ran away to see. The other was elected vice president of the United States and nothing was heard of either of them again.

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