Grover Cleveland. Calvin Coolidge. Andrew Johnson. Sarah Palin?
If Alaska's Gov. Palin wins her bid to become vice president, she will be the first woman to reach the White House, of course. But she'll also join a very short list of former mayors who rose to the top rungs of the executive branch.
Mr. Cleveland, who was mayor of Buffalo, N.Y., and Mr. Coolidge, of Northampton, Mass., are the only mayors to have won the presidency, while Mr. Johnson, mayor of Greeneville, Tenn., became president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Hubert Humphrey, who was mayor of Minneapolis, is one of only five vice presidents to have held that title. Gov. Palin, former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, would make it six.
That raises the question: Why not mayors? Mayors are expected to solve complicated problems while balancing the demands of competing constituencies -- good training for the ultimate executive job.
Governors, with a similar mandate, have been far more successful at reaching the White House. Sixteen presidents previously were governors, including four of the last five: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
The mayor's office, though, is where the rubber meets the road -- or perhaps the pothole, which explains some of the reason mayors have fared less well. "There are easier routes to the top" that don't involve trash collection, welfare services and zoning battles, says University of Texas political scientist Bruce Buchanan. "It's easy to mess up" as mayor, he adds.
Gov. Palin spent six years as Wasilla mayor -- as much time as Presidents Cleveland, Coolidge and Johnson combined spent in city hall. Two of the three men led bigger cities, though. The 1880 census, taken two years before Mr. Cleveland settled in as mayor, put Buffalo's population at 155,134.
Northampton, then a powerhouse in the U.S. silk industry, had a population of 19,431 in 1910 when Mr. Coolidge took office. Greeneville, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment, had 660 people, including 114 slaves, in the 1850 census -- two decades after Mr. Johnson left office, but the first census to count the population of cities and not just counties.
Wasilla's population was 5,469 in the 2000 census, which came in the middle of then-Mayor Palin's term.
Andrew Johnson was the mayor of Greeneville, Tenn. before becoming a United States president. Getty Images
Mr. Cleveland earned a reputation as a Democratic Party maverick as mayor and moved after two years to the New York governor's office and then, two years after that, to the White House. "Silent Cal" Coolidge took a more circuitous route through Republican politics: lieutenant governor, governor, vice president and then president when Warren Harding died in office in 1923.
Mr. Johnson, is the only president to have been governor, senator and vice president -- and one of two, along with Mr. Clinton, to be impeached. The only other mayors to make it to vice president: James Sherman, mayor of Utica, who served under William Taft, and George Dallas, mayor of Philadelphia, who was understudy to James Polk.
Mayors have had a tough time making the leap to national office since then. Dennis Kucinich, who was mayor of Cleveland when its bankers forced it into default, won just 99,962 of the 37 million ballots cast in this year's Democratic primaries. New York's Rudy Giuliani withdrew from the Republican primaries without winning a single delegate.
The mess-up factor is part of the reason mayors fare so poorly in national races, political scientists say. John Lindsay made a run for president in the Democratic primaries in 1972 but was done in by the strikes, crime and budget deficits that plagued his term as New York mayor -- and perhaps worse, his administration's inability to clear the streets of snow.
Nagging local issues aren't the only impediments. Most mayors come from communities that are too small to launch a career: Just 34 cities have a population of more than 500,000, says the Census Bureau.
Those big cities tend to be liberal bastions that are out of sync with the rest of their state, says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University in College Station. Think Chicago and Illinois, or Austin and Texas.
Ethnic politics tend to dominate big cities, producing African-American or Hispanic mayors now, and Irish, Italian and Catholic mayors a few generations ago. Race and religion have effectively excluded those mayors from national tickets.
But many of them also have spent their careers cultivating minority voters instead of the broader constituency they need to run for national office, says University of Michigan political scientist Kenneth Kollman.
Cities also have limited taxing authority to pay for the housing, school and transportation projects that could catapult a mayor into the national spotlight. Instead, cities are dependant on state legislatures and Congress for money. Both of those are dominated by suburban and rural lawmakers, who usually have their own claims on the money.
Mayor Cleveland vetoed a street-cleaning contract that his council had awarded to the highest bidder. Mayor Coolidge raised teacher salaries. Mayor Johnson made his reputation advocating for "the common man" farmer. Mayor Palin built an ice rink and fixed the roads. Then all four got out of city hall.
—Easha Anand contributed to this article.
Write to June Kronholz at email@example.com