The earliest reference to a vice-presidential running mate as the ticket’s “attack dog” may have come from the legendary columnist Mary McGrory in 1976, who used the phrase to criticize Gerald Ford’s choice of Bob Dole. Dole, McGrory wrote, was a “rabid partisan.” As such, the Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter, she believed, would do well to recognize Dole as “an attack dog who can be ignored.”
For commentators like McGrory, the corruption of the Nixon-Agnew years seemed to call for a more dignified politics. But she remained concerned that, especially among conservatives, political rhetoric was becoming more consistently aggressive. Dole, she wrote, was “a bone thrown to the smoldering right.” Defeat in 1976, McGrory predicted accurately, wouldn’t stop the inroads an emerging hard right was making into the GOP. “No matter how often you feed right-wingers,” they remained, “ravenous” in McGrory’s words.
Sure enough, within a matter of years, strategists began to see an attack dog running mate as a potential asset for presidential campaigns. As Jerry Gray of the New York Times wrote, it was a way of “allowing the candidate for President to remain above the gritty fray and safe from potential public backlash.” Newsday concurred with “the theory that a mudslinging presidential candidate risks splattering himself.”
This was the case with the patricianly George H.W. Bush’s choice of the younger, exuberant Indiana Senator Dan Quayle in 1988. After a rocky start to his vice-presidential campaign, Quayle eventually found his stride in his “designated role as [Bush’s] top attack dog.” While Bush himself threw some rhetorical punches at Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, Quayle took satisfaction in drawing some of the criticism away from Bush himself. As he recalled later, “from a political point of view, if they wanted to…put all the energy into going after the Vice President, fine, because then they’d be giving more of a free ride to the President.”
Still, it was not yet a given that the running mate would play the attack dog role. In fact, in 1996, Dole selected Jack Kemp as his running mate, and the former quarterback refused to play along. Late in the campaign, Kemp spent precious time defending his political style, repeating when interviewed, “I am not an attack dog.” He preferred to present a positive case for a Dole presidency instead. Four years later, Democrat Joe Lieberman insisted that a presidential campaign “doesn’t have to be nasty” and that he would “not play the traditional role of . . . the attack dog.”