Once continually made fun of for the uselessness of the office, the U.S. vice presidency has seen a rise in power in the last 30 years.

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More: Check Out All 46 VPs

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While early vice presidents were often ignored by their presidents and had to be content with ceremonial duties, recent ones have had a hand in shaping policy.

Vice President George H.W. Bush had lunch with President Ronald Reagan to discuss policy every week, and Vice President Al Gore did the same thing with President Bill Clinton, said Alexander Lamis, associate professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

"It's been an amazing transformation," Lamis said of the vice presidency. "Before this era, vice presidents were ignored, they weren't seen as key policy makers. (Now) presidential candidates have told their running mates that 'I want you to be an important part of my administration.' And they follow through."

Current Vice President Dick Cheney has taken this power to a new level, although just how much power he has wielded won't be clear until some time after the George W. Bush presidency, Lamis said.

But "it's clear that Dick Cheney has been a very powerful force," he said.

While it may seem that many of the vice presidents before the modern era labored in anonymity, nine of them jumped into the presidency directly from the vice president's chair when a sitting president died or resigned.

And still some others became more infamous than famous -- one killed a founding father in a duel, one was forced to resign because of criminal charges and another allegedly took his oath of office while drunk on whiskey.

The U.S. Constitution does not provide for any direct duties for the vice president, other than to preside over the Senate and break voting ties.

And until 1804, the person with the second-most electoral college votes in the presidential election became the nation's No. 2 -- regardless of that person's political party and whether they got along with their president.

In fact, President George Washington paid little attention to his No. 2, John Adams, who would later become president himself. So Adams threw himself into his job of presiding over the Senate. His record of 29 tie-breaking votes stands to this day.

Adams found it hard to keep his disdain of the office to himself, complaining to his wife, Abigail, that "my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived."

However, Adams' friend Thomas Jefferson, who also served in both offices and was Adams' vice president, didn't seem to mind the anonymity as much. "The second office of this government is honorable and easy," Jefferson said of the vice presidency. "The first is but a splendid misery."

But experts agree that it wasn't until after President Gerald Ford left office that vice presidents began gaining power, a trend that has lasted until this day.

In 1976, President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale took office. Mondale proved to be a trusted adviser to Carter and said the two had "no secrets."

In a pre-inauguration memo to his new president, Mondale said he hoped to "offer impartial advice and help assure that you are not shielded from points of view that you should hear."

In the post-Watergate era, he was basically telling the president that it was no longer an option to insulate the president from opinions other than his own.

Certainly Watergate, which forced Richard M. Nixon to resign as president, shook the presidency and tried the public's trust in government.

But the office of the presidency does not have a lock on scandals and notoriety -- one of the nation's most colorful characters only rose as high as the office of vice president.

Aaron Burr Jr., of New York, was Jefferson's vice president. Formerly New York's attorney general and a U.S. senator, Burr was one of the founding members of the Democratic-Republican party, part of which would eventually become the Democratic Party of today.

In the election of 1800, he and Jefferson tied in the electoral college at 73 votes. It was only after 36 ballots in the House of Representatives that Jefferson was chosen president and Burr vice president.

While still vice president in 1804, Burr took umbrage to a remark by Alexander Hamilton. He challenged Hamilton, the founder of the Federalist party, to a duel.

Across the river from New York in New Jersey on July 11, 1804, Burr fatally shot Hamilton -- which eventually led to the death of Hamilton's Federalist party.

"It's an event that's still written about," said Lamis from Case Western Reserve University.

Burr was charged with murder in two states but was never convicted. He was later also tried for treason regarding a regiment of men he later formed in the West, but was acquitted.

It wasn't until Nixon's first vice president, Spiro Agnew, that a vice president resigned because of criminal charges.

Agnew was under investigation for tax fraud and extortion when he pleaded no contest to a tax charge in 1973 and was forced to resign.

Agnew was famous while he was in office for attacking enemies with unusual, alliterative phrases like "nattering nabobs of negativism," "pusillanimous pussyfooters" and "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."

He left office "under a legal cloud," Lamis said.

At least one vice president may have entered office in a cloud of whiskey fumes.

Andrew Johnson, who became president when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, appeared drunk at his inauguration in 1865 and gave a rambling speech. He later said he had been drinking to offset the pain of an infection.

How do 2008's two contenders for the office measure up against the 46 vice presidents who came before -- from Adams to Cheney?

Sen. Barack Obama's running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, has been a senator since 1972. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been governor for less than two years and before that was mayor of a small Alaska town.

But Lamis said concerns over Palin’s experience are hollow.

"She certainly has executive experience, as any governor has," Lamis said. "When you come to the foreign affairs arena, it's clear that she's not well-versed. But we've had other presidents who have not been particularly knowledgeable about foreign affairs and they've done well."

Lamis said much of the criticism on both sides this year was "partisan hysteria."

But whoever wins, they will likely have an important role in their president's administration.

"The vice president has become a much more important figure in the last half-century," Lamis said.