“I heard Joe’s retiring, moving back to Delaware, which is good,” said comedian Larry Wilmore at the White House Correspondents dinner on Saturday night. “He won’t have to answer any more difficult questions like, ‘Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?’” Wilmore may not have known it, but he was recycling an 85-year-old joke from the Gershwin’s musical "Of Thee I Sing." A running gag in George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind’s book for the show is Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom’s fruitless quest to find two references so he can get a library card. As St. Louis University law professor Joel K. Goldstein makes clear in "The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden." Wilmore’s understanding of the vice presidency is even more outdated than his joke. Arguably, the three most recent vice presidents—Al Gore, Richard Cheney and Biden—were the second most influential members of the administrations in which they served, taking all eight years of their tenures into account. The roots of their influence reach back to 1945, when Franklin D. Roosevelt died and Harry
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