He managed to quickly dismiss a briefly threatening challenge for the presidential nomination from former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. But he has continued to struggle with impressions that the vice presidency is not a visible and tangible office. Gore's problem is generic to his position, said Charles O. Jones, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. Most of them couldn't win the presidential nomination on their own without being the vice president. Gore, in fact, preceded his vice presidential tenure with a brief, unsuccessful run for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.
History is rife with anecdotes of the undesirability of the vice presidency.
In 1900, then-Gov. Theodore Roosevelt of New York initially was opposed to the vice presidential nomination, saying he could do more as governor than vice president. Nixon narrowly lost to Democrat John F. Kennedy, though he rebounded to win the White House in 1968 and 1972. He refused to depart from Johnson's Vietnam War policy, which was politically unpopular. Only in early October, after Humphrey delivered a speech in Salt Lake City that put some distance between himself and the administration on Vietnam, did Humphrey begin to recover in the polls.