LOS ANGELES -- Breaking out of the cage, fleeing the nest, flying the coop. By any other name, the Throttlebottom effect describes imprisonment. Al Gore's escape from it has given him a postconvention ''bounce'' in the polls.
Gore made news here when he declared, ''I stand here tonight as my own man.'' No kidding. A useful way to look at headlines and lead paragraphs is to reverse them. A truly big story would depict Gore saying: ''My own man? Not me. The big guy in the White House is still pulling the strings. Yes, folks, I remain a hapless Pinocchio.''
The modern vice president lives in a maximum security facility, a big mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, winkled away from the Navy in the 1970s. Its first occupant was Nelson Rockefeller, the nation's second unelected veep, appointed by the first, Gerald Ford. Before that, veeps had to find their own digs.
In the 1931 musical ''Of Thee I Sing,'' the running mate to President John Wintergreen, Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom, ''lives at 1448 Z Street ... with the other boarders.'' He mostly ''sits around in the park and feeds the pigeons, and takes walks, and goes to the movies.'' Victor Moore, the stalwart Broadway-Hollywood sidekick, played Throttlebottom as an amiable buffoon and a perfect nonentity, the forerunner of vice president jokes on late-night TV.
Since then, Air Force Two, the mansion, and a huge staff have improved job conditions. Being vice president helps win the nomination. But in November, before a larger audience, having been a silent second banana is still a mixed blessing. In its essential requirements, the job has changed little. One task, which Gore tackled diligently, is to stifle oneself, to regard one's views and beliefs the way one would treat Social Security and Medicare, putting both ''in an ironclad lock box where the politicians can't touch them.''
Joe Moakley, the Massachusetts congressman who was the first to understand the soul of Joe Six-Pack, explained the Throttlebottom effect while waiting on the floor for Gore's acceptance speech. ''I like Al Gore. Most people who've met him like him,'' Moakley said. ''But I understand why people who know him only from television don't like him. They don't know him. All they've seen for seven years is a guy standing in back of the president and nodding his head.''
Long before George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and George and Ira Gershwin invented Throttlebottom, Finley Peter Dunne's ''Mr. Dooley'' observed in 1906: ''It's sthrange about th' vice-prisidincy. Th' prisidincy is the highest office in th' gift iv th' people. Th' vice-prisidincy is th' next highest an' th' lowest. It isn't a crime exactly. Ye can't be sint to jail f'r it, but it's a kind iv a disgrace. It's like writin' anonymous letters.''
But since Throttlebottom's debut in 1931, the vice president has not been anonymous, at least not to Democrats. Of the party's 14 veep candidates to reach the November ballot, 12 had subsequent or prior experience as a presidential candidate. The only two who did not reach for the top were John Sparkman, the 1952 nominee, and Geraldine Ferraro, the nominee in 1984.
The official hero, patron saint, and role model of campaigning vice presidents is Harry Truman, whose comeback in 1948 several successors sought to emulate. An incumbent veep starts the campaign as a figure of fun, gradually gets taken seriously, closes the gap, then wins or comes close. George H. W. Bush won in 1988. Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Ford in 1976 lost by slim margins.
Americans hoot and holler at every heir of Throttlebottom, heaping scorn until they decide to give the guy a chance. Even if Gore loses this year, his VP choice would be an unusual accomplice if he did not run for president himself in 2004. As Joe Lieberman asked the Democrats assembled here, ''Is America a great country or what?''
Martin F. Nolan's column appears regularly in the Globe.
