E
very presidential election is historic, placing the United States at a crossroads.
Crouse, “The Making of the President 1960” by Theodore White, and “Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.
We can learn a lot about the American psyche by taking a close look at presidential elections.
The long campaigns that take place today can cause us to just wish they were over. But every campaign is historic and quite incredible.
During the 2012 general election campaign, Ole Miss students were given the opportunity to compare past campaigns to the ensuing battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. They also observed how the press covers presidential campaigns.
We tend to forget that only 43 people have been president during the history of our nation. (Not 44. Even though Obama is called the 44th president, Grover Cleveland is counted twice because his two terms weren’t consecutive.)
The technological initiatives of the Obama campaign set new standards for future campaigns, but a lot of the 2012 action followed predictable patterns from past campaigns. Curtis Wilkie, a political and journalistic impresario, co-taught this fall semester class with me. He and I first met during the 1976 presidential campaign between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Curtis covered eight presidential campaigns, mostly for the big-time Boston Globe. I covered parts of campaigns dating back to 1968, mostly for smaller newspapers. Although Curtis and I view ourselves primarily as journalists, we have participated briefly on the political side. Curtis was a member of the first bi-racial Mississippi Democratic delegation to be seated at a Democratic National convention in Chicago in 1968, perhaps the most tumultuous convention in history. I coordinated things for the Tennessee Republican delegation at the Republican National convention in Detroit in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was nominated. Throughout the fall semester, as the Obama-Romney campaign was unfolding, journalists, pundits, consultants, even former Democratic nominee George McGovern spoke to the students in our class. The students wrote weekly news analyses about the issues and nuances of the campaign and its developments. They read and discussed three classic books about presidential campaigns: “Boys on the Bus” by Timothy
Looking ahead, nobody knows who will win the presidential election in 2016. But past campaigns should convince us that the nominees and ultimate victor will be decided by party, issues, money and image, plus technology. CHARLES OVERBY Only 38 have actually been elected president. Five vice presidents who succeeded their running mates because of death or resignation failed to be elected president in their own right. Still, being vice president is a good career choice for a person who wants to be president. Of the last 20 presidents since 1900, seven were vice president first. When you consider every past presidential election, there are four main factors in being elected president: party, issues, money, image. Everything else flows from those four things. Perhaps surprisingly, issues rarely top the list as the main influence on the outcome of the campaign. Issues and money influence every election to some degree, but party and image historically play the biggest roles. When Thomas Jefferson defeated John
Adams in 1800, it marked the first time a candidate from a different party assumed power. Jefferson won primarily because he wasn’t a Federalist. Jefferson always is listed as one of the greatest presidents—usually behind George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But Jefferson almost didn’t win. Jefferson found himself in an Electoral College tie with his vice presidential running mate, the incorrigible Aaron Burr. The constitution did not provide for separate ballots for president and vice president in 1800, so the tie resulted in the election being decided by the House of Representatives—one vote per state. Amazingly, it took the House 35 ballots to decide between Jefferson—one of our best presidents ever—and Burr, certainly our worst vice president. Any decent vice presidential candidate would not have allowed his name to go forward to the House, but Burr held out hope the Federalists would choose him over Jefferson. While he was the vice president, Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804 in a duel. He was charged with murder in both New York and New Jersey, but was never brought to trial. The Jefferson-Adams contest is considered the first partisan presidential race, and it produced nasty negative campaigning as bad as or even worse than what we see today. Jefferson was attacked by the Adams campaign for his religion—or the lack of it. He was accused of being an atheist or deist. This ad ran almost daily in the Gazette of the United States, a leading Federalist newspaper: “THE ONLY QUESTION TO BE ASKED BY EVERY American, laying his hand on his heart, is ‘Shall I continue in allegiance to God—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or impiously declare for JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!’” If party made the main difference in 1800, image decided the outcome in 1828, when Andrew Jackson defeated incumbent John Quincy Adams. It marked the first time