Daily Inspiration Quote by Bill Vaughan

The Vice-Presidency, in Vaughan's telling, isn't power so much as etiquette theater: a job framed as beneath ambition precisely so ambition can safely want it. The "last cookie on the plate" is a domestic, almost childish image, and that's the point. It shrinks a supposedly dignified constitutional office into a petty social ritual where everyone performs restraint while calculating advantage. No one wants to look hungry; everyone is hungry.

Vaughan, a midcentury American newspaperman with a nose for hypocrisy, is needling the public script around political striving. Candidates and party elders treat the vice-presidential nod like a reluctant sacrifice: "I didn't seek this; I was asked to serve". The joke lands because the audience recognizes the choreography. The VP slot has long been sold as consolation prize, party unity bandage, regional balancing act. Saying "he won't take it" is the polite fiction that keeps the aspirant from seeming grasping and keeps the party from seeming transactional.

There's a darker subtext, too: the vice presidency is both trivialized and unavoidable. Someone "always does" because the system demands a body in the role, and because the role is a hedge - a heartbeat away from the real cookie. Vaughan's line captures how American politics launders naked ambition through manners, turning appetite into virtue by pretending it isn't there.