I'm sure you've all heard this name in recent days. For those of you not up to speed on your Vice Presidential trivia (probably a good thing), John Nance Garner was FDR's Vice President for his first two terms. He famously and strangely began to oppose FDR in the second term, eventually challenging FDR unsuccessfully (obviously) for the Democratic nomination, and thus was replaced for the third term by Henry A. Wallace, who himself was replaced for the fourth term by Truman.
Garner, the 32nd Vice President of the United States, famously said the office was "not worth a bucket of warm piss."
"What?!" you may say, "didn't he say 'warm spit?!'"
Well I'm here to tell you that this blatant misquote has lasted for about 7 decades and shows no sign of stopping, so I am taking matters into my own hands
John Nance Garner is remembered really for one thing only. Unfortunately for him, his only lasting legacy is this quote which has been repeatedly misquoted so much that few now know what he actually said.
I understand why the media would replace piss with spit, considering they are probably not supposed to say piss on TV, but I have heard this quote about 180 billion times in the last 3 days, with nary a mention that he never used the term 'spit.'
Furthermore, we all know that the Vice Presidency has evolved since the 30's, and is now a fairly powerful position, especially in the case of the current VP (ewww!). It's ridiculous to say someone would turn an offer from Obama down because the office doesn't give the officeholder much power. There may be other reasons to turn it down, but this isn't one of them. While the Constitution might grant very little explicit power to the Vice President, the VP today wields a significantly large amount of power.
Despite the fact that this quote is moot in today's world, the various pundits insist on including it in every discussion about Veepstakes of any sort. This is becoming increasingly annoying, and I now have two requests for all of you:
-know that it's piss not spit
-know that the office holds much more power than it did 70 years ago
(By the way, I'm watching CNN while writing this and they've again misquoted him twice in the last 10 minutes.)