Anything for a Vote Read online




  Copyright © 2007 by Joseph Cummins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

  in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2007925761

  eISBN: 978-1-59474-584-3

  Designed by Doogie Horner

  Illustrations by Mike Fink

  e-book production management by Melissa Jacobson

  Cover photos courtesy AP Images

  Quirk Books

  215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

  quirkbooks.com

  v3.1

  FOR DEDE AND CARSON,

  WHO GET MY VOTE EVERY TIME.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  1789 GEORGE WASHINGTON VS. HIMSELF

  1792 GEORGE WASHINGTON VS. HIMSELF (AGAIN)

  1796 JOHN ADAMS VS. THOMAS JEFFERSON

  1800 THOMAS JEFFERSON VS. JOHN ADAMS

  1804 THOMAS JEFFERSON VS. CHARLES PINCKNEY

  1808 JAMES MADISON VS. CHARLES PINCKNEY

  1812 JAMES MADISON VS. DEWITT CLINTON

  1816 JAMES MONROE VS. RUFUS KING

  1820 JAMES MONROE VS. HIMSELF

  1824 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS VS. ANDREW JACKSON

  1828 ANDREW JACKSON VS. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

  1832 ANDREW JACKSON VS. HENRY CLAY

  1836 MARTIN VAN BUREN VS. WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON

  1840 WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON VS. MARTIN VAN BUREN

  1844 JAMES POLK VS. HENRY CLAY

  1848 ZACHARY TAYLOR VS. LEWIS CASS

  1852 FRANKLIN PIERCE VS. WINFIELD SCOTT

  1856 JAMES BUCHANAN VS. JOHN FRÉMONT

  1860 ABRAHAM LINCOLN VS. STEPHEN DOUGLAS

  1864 ABRAHAM LINCOLN VS. GEORGE MCCLELLAN

  1868 ULYSSES S. GRANT VS. HORATIO SEYMOUR

  1872 ULYSSES S. GRANT VS. HORACE GREELEY

  1876 RUTHERFORD HAYES VS. SAMUEL TILDEN

  1880 JAMES GARFIELD VS. WINFIELD HANCOCK

  1884 GROVER CLEVELAND VS. JAMES G. BLAINE

  1888 BENJAMIN HARRISON VS. GROVER CLEVELAND

  1892 GROVER CLEVELAND VS. BENJAMIN HARRISON

  1896 WILLIAM MCKINLEY VS. WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN

  1900 WILLIAM MCKINLEY VS. WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN

  1904 THEODORE ROOSEVELT VS. ALTON PARKER

  1908 WILLIAM TAFT VS. WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN

  1912 WOODROW WILSON VS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT VS. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

  1916 WOODROW WILSON VS. CHARLES HUGHES

  1920 WARREN G. HARDING VS. JAMES COX

  1924 CALVIN COOLIDGE VS. JOHN DAVIS

  1928 HERBERT HOOVER VS. AL SMITH

  1932 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT VS. HERBERT HOOVER

  1936 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT VS. ALFRED “ALF” LANDON

  1940 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT VS. WENDELL WILLKIE

  1944 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT VS. THOMAS DEWEY

  1948 HARRY TRUMAN VS. THOMAS DEWEY

  1952 DWIGHT EISENHOWER VS. ADLAI STEVENSON

  1956 DWIGHT EISENHOWER VS. ADLAI STEVENSON

  1960 JOHN F. KENNEDY VS. RICHARD NIXON

  1964 LYNDON JOHNSON VS. BARRY GOLDWATER

  1968 RICHARD NIXON VS. HUBERT HUMPHREY

  1972 RICHARD NIXON VS. GEORGE MCGOVERN

  1976 JIMMY CARTER VS. GERALD FORD

  1980 RONALD REAGAN VS. JIMMY CARTER

  1984 RONALD REAGAN VS. WALTER MONDALE

  1988 GEORGE H. W. BUSH VS. MICHAEL DUKAKIS

  1992 WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON VS. GEORGE H.W. BUSH

  1996 WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON VS. BOB DOLE

  2000 GEORGE W. BUSH VS. AL GORE

  2004 GEORGE W. BUSH VS. JOHN KERRY

  2008 BARACK OBAMA VS. JOHN MCCAIN

  APPENDIX

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  “What do men gain by elective governments, if fools and knaves have the same chance to obtain the highest office, as honest men?”

  —Noah Webster to Thomas Jefferson, 1801

  The idea for this book was born shortly after the 2004 presidential election. In that contentious contest, Democratic candidate and war hero John Kerry was vilified as a coward by an organization called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, while incumbent president George W. Bush was rumored to be such a dunce that he had to be wired to a transmitter to participate in a public debate.

  During election postmortems, I listened as pundits moaned about how sleazy the campaign had become, how the candidates had stooped to new lows of dirty tricks and vicious discourse. Yet, it seemed to me that I’d heard this same tune played after every presidential contest I’d lived through. So I asked myself, are things really getting worse? Have presidential campaigns truly turned more vicious?

  After a year and a half spent researching and writing Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots, and October Surprises In U.S. Presidential Campaigns, I can happily answer that question with a resounding No. Presidential elections haven’t gotten worse—they’re just as dirty now as they’ve always been. Democracy has never been for the faint of heart. Every dirty election in current times can easily be matched by one further back in history. What party stole a close presidential election from the Democrats in Florida? The Republicans in 1876, during the Hayes-Tilden face-off. Which presidential candidate kept company with a “smoking bimbo” and was rumored to have sired a love child? That would be Warren Harding in 1920. What president bugged his opponent’s headquarters? Why Richard Nixon, of course—but also Lyndon Johnson, whose 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater is one of the dirtiest on record.

  Probably the only clean election in American history was the first one, in 1789, in which George Washington ran unopposed. By the next ballot, in 1792, the nation’s first political parties had begun to form. Four years later, the two rivals were going at it full force … and they haven’t stopped since.

  During the past 220 years of Americans voting for their presidents, much has changed. In the beginning, the framers of the Constitution dictated that there would be no direct popular vote; instead, the president was chosen by electors appointed by state legislatures. Each elector could cast two votes for president: the top vote-getter became president, the runner-up vice president. This made it possible for a president to have a vice president from a different party, as happened in 1796 when Thomas Jefferson became John Adams’s White House partner. (For a contemporary reference, imagine George W. Bush with John Kerry as his veep, and you’ll have some idea of the trouble caused.)

  In 1824, however, Americans began electing their president by popular vote, and over the next century, presidential electioneering became the country’s favorite spectator sport. Nineteenth-century customs dictated that candidates maintain a dignified public silence during the campaign, but that didn’t keep members of both parties from fighting like pigs over truffles. Huge rallies were held in candidates’ honor, and newspapers—usually aligned with a political party, a practice that ended only in the mid-twentieth century—hurled lavish insults at the presidential hopefuls. (You haven’t lived until you’ve been trashed by a nineteenth-century tabloid.) Voter turnout was extraordinary—consistently in the high seventieth percentile. Note that today, depending on which statistics you believe, it ranges from 49 to 55 percent.

  As I wrote this book, many people (hidden agendas gleaming in their eyes) asked me which party had resorted to the dirtiest tricks. Depends on the situation, I would usually reply. Frankly, they’ve both acted pretty badly at different times throughout our nation’s history.

  In general, my research revealed two things:

  1) Incumben
t parties are more likely to wage dirty presidential campaigns, probably because they have more money and influence.

  2) Parties with the strongest ideologies—be they Democratic or Republican—tend to wage the nastiest battles. If you sincerely believe that you have a better candidate and a superior life philosophy, you’re more willing to pull out all the stops to ensure your party wins.

  And dirty tricks do influence the outcome of presidential elections. In some of the ugliest elections of all time—from the Jefferson-Adams bloodbath of 1800 through the Hoover-Smith smearfest of 1928 to the Bush-Gore millennial madness—the party responsible for the dirtiest tricks usually won.

  If all this sounds pretty grim, cheer up. Without smears, innuendo, and thievery tainting our electoral system, what would we have to connect us to our quickly vanishing past? Believe me: You could take any Whig or Federalist of yore, plunk him down in a modern presidential campaign, and (once accustomed to television and the Internet) he’d be up and shrieking with the best of us.

  We’re Americans, after all. A nice, dirty election runs in our blood.

  GEORGE WASHINGTON

  VS.

  HIMSELF

  “Welcome, mighty chief! Once more

  Welcome to this mighty shore

  Now no mercenary foe—

  Aims at thee the fatal blow!”

  —Ode to George Washington performed by thirteen girls (one for each of the new states) as Washington journeyed to his first inauguration

  In the very beginning—before primaries, spin control, PACs, sound bites, hanging chads, and talking heads—electing a president was a clean, sober, and dignified business.

  Before the first presidential election in 1789, Alexander Hamilton envisioned future candidates as men “most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” Those who chose such men would, by definition, be men of high seriousness and probity, the kind of men who might pick a pastor for a church or select the head of a new university.

  And the first time, it worked out pretty much that way.

  THE CAMPAIGN (SUCH AS IT WAS)

  In 1789, America was like a newborn babe, and since the birth pains included a bloody and divisive war, a calming paternal figure was needed. The only one who really fit the bill was Commander-in-Chief George Washington, who was even then being called the father of his country.

  Washington was not happy about being the anointed one. He was a genuinely reluctant leader who, at the age of fifty-six, thought he was too far past his prime to undertake such a challenge. (He told his future secretary of war, Henry Knox: “My movement to the chair of Government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”)

  But Washington had presided over the Constitutional Convention, which met in Philadelphia in 1787 to create a coherent democratic governing system. His friends Alexander Hamilton and James Madison convinced him that America needed his presence—if only to make sure that the gains of the Revolution did not disappear in factional infighting between state’s rights advocates and those who favored a strong central government.

  Never mind that the general had some decidedly undemocratic ways about him, such as his habit of referring to himself in the third person like an eighteenth-century Julius Caesar, and his dislike of shaking hands (he preferred bowing). Washington was the man, all the way.

  The first presidential election in American history was also the quickest. There was no popular vote and there would not be one until 1824. Instead, following rules set down in the newly ratified Constitution, each state appointed presidential electors in January 1789 (except New York, which failed to appoint its allotted eight electors in time and thus sat out this first election). With the first Electoral College thus established, the electors cast two votes for two different people—a point that would become extremely controversial in early American history. The man who received the most votes would become president; the man coming in second would be vice president.

  The only hint of skullduggery came from the crafty Alexander Hamilton. He urged electors to “waste” their second votes on candidates who were not even in the running, so that his rival John Adams—patriot and framer of the Declaration of Independence—would have absolutely no chance of becoming president.

  THE WINNER: GEORGE WASHINGTON

  Hamilton’s strategy was quite unnecessary, for Washington had everything sewn up from the beginning and walked away with all sixty-nine electoral votes. All Hamilton really accomplished was to royally tick off John Adams; he would later complain about the “scurvy manner” in which he had been made vice president.

  These grumblings foreshadowed things to come—but for the time being, all was wonderful. Washington made his triumphal entry into New York City, the nation’s temporary capital, on April 30, 1789. Thousands of spectators thronged the road that led from Mount Vernon, cheering and tossing flowers. The first president was ferried across the Hudson River on an enormous barge manned by thirteen white-smocked sailors; the barge was surrounded by a veritable flotilla of ships, filled to the gunwales with celebrants who sang Washington’s praises to the spring skies.

  In more ways than one, the election of 1789 was the smoothest sailing an American presidential candidate would ever have.

  OF COURSE, THE SAILING WASN’T COMPLETELY SMOOTH The acerbic John Adams did claim that the only reason Washington was chosen for everything was that he was taller than anyone else in the room.

  In the very beginning, electing a president was a clean, sober, and dignified business.

  WASHINGTON

  VS.

  HIMSELF (AGAIN)

  “Damn ’em, damn ’em, damn ’em. You see—an elective government won’t do!”

  —John Adams

  In 1792, things got just a little worse. Being the first president meant that Washington had a lot of ceremonial stuff to figure out, for example, what he should be called (“Mr. President” was finally settled on, although John Adams grumbled that the term president recalled such commoners as “presidents of fire companies and clubs”). But there was much more substantial fare on the presidential menu, including the ever-delicate matter of relations with Great Britain and how the administration was to react to the French Revolution (Washington was all for it, until the Terror brought up the fearful specter of mob rule).

  As Father of the Nation, Washington also had to deal with quarreling kids. The children in this case were cabinet members Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, and their dispute helped create something the framers of the Constitution hadn’t quite bargained for: the first American political parties.

  Hamilton, in spite of (or because of) his impoverished origins, had no great trust in the common people. He believed in a strong, firm-handed central government and, as secretary of treasury under Washington, created a federal bank and sponsored measures that helped the rich merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of the cities in the Northeast. People who shared Hamilton’s views came to be called Federalists.

  Secretary of State Jefferson, although a landed aristocrat by birth, believed in the power of the people—the people preferably being farmers in an idealized agrarian society. He thought that Hamilton’s form of government meant too much power vested in too few hands. Those who agreed with Jefferson’s point of view called themselves Republicans.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  With his first term nearing completion, Washington wanted nothing more than to return to Mount Vernon to spend his remaining years in bucolic retreat with his wife, Martha. But with the country starting to split, he decided to run one more time, as a unifying figure.

  Fifteen states participated in the 1792 election, compared with only ten in 1789. North Carolina and Rhode Island had finally ratified the constitution; New York, which had abstained the first time around, added its vote; and two new states joined the Union: Vermont and Kentucky.

  Since Washington was considered a shoo-in,
the only remaining question was whether Federalist Vice President John Adams would get a second term. Republican congressmen from five states convened in the fall and proposed New York Governor George Clinton as their veep candidate. Federalists perceived this as such a threat that even Alexander Hamilton, Adams’s own sworn enemy, saw fit to coach the vice president in spin control, advising Adams to tone down some of his more inflammatory Federalist pronouncements. For instance, Adams had written that the country would be a better place if ruled by “the rich [and] well-born.” This may have been an honest summation of his feelings, but it was terrible PR.

  THE WINNER: GEORGE, AGAIN

  No one was surprised when all 132 electors gave their first vote for Washington. Adams received 77 votes to Governor Clinton’s 50. He considered this a sign of disrespect and thus the stage was set for 1796 and the first truly contested presidential election in American history.

  IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ’EM, START YOUR OWN NEWSPAPER Hamilton and his pal John Fenno, editor of the Gazette of the United States, took aim at Jefferson and Republican supporters like James Madison at every opportunity. They claimed that Jefferson (whom Hamilton was fond of addressing sardonically in print as “Generalissimo”) was a man of “profound ambition and violent passions” who would do anything to become president.

  Jefferson responded by funding a rag called the National Gazette, in whose pages James Madison wrote nineteen different articles designed to fan anti-Federalist flames. Hamilton’s adherents, Madison said, were “monied men of influence.” With broad sarcasm, he told his readers that, under Hamilton’s plan, citizens “should think of nothing but obedience, leaving the care of their liberties to their wiser rulers.”

  GET THEM DRUNK, AND THEY WILL COME These days, presidential candidates go on television and urge citizens, in the most sober of tones, to do their civic duty and vote. In 1792, candidates had a different idea—get voters hammered on your tab and naturally they’d vote for you. The Gazette of the United States reported that “a bystander, observing the particular situation of a great number of electors, who had been regaled at the expense of one of the candidates, remarked … that the Voice of the People was the Voice of Grog.”