“Ever get the feelin’ you’ve been cheated?”—Johnny Rotten
Posted on 02/04/2008 7:42:16 PM PST by dufekin
In the 38 elections since the first Republican convention chose John Charles Frémont to carry their 1856 presidential campaign, only 3 Republicans who served in the Senate ever got elected to the Presidency.
And only Warren Gamaliel Harding won every Presidential election in which he contested. Elected in 1920 on a platform of content-free Senatorial blather, he perished before the unraveling of the incredible scandals of his Administration and thus didn't bear the consequences personally. No other Senator boasted his perfect record (1-0) in Presidential elections.
Senator Benjamin Harrison narrowly won election in 1888 and thereby became the only Senator ever to unseat an incumbent President in American history. He won fame because of his grandfather William Henry Harrison, who served as President for a month during 1841. Benjamin Harrison still lost the popular vote in his successful election, accomplished almost nothing, and lost to his predecessor in 1892.
Richard Milhous Nixon served as a Senator for California for a couple years before he ascended to the vice-presidency in the Administration of Dwight David Eisenhower. He narrowly (and some would contend controversially) lost the 1960 Presidential election. He managed to win the 1968 election with his Southern strategy that took advantage of Democrats in disarray, but his cheating during the 1972 landslide reelection campaign unraveled into the media coup of Watergate. He ultimately resigned in disgrace, and only a gracious pardon from President Ford halted the punishing circus.
Notwithstanding the reelection of Nixon, none of these three Presidents proved particularly good. Now let us consider the Senators who ran for President unsuccessfully on the Republican ticket:
John Charles Frémont James Gillespie Blaine Barry Morris Goldwater Robert Joseph Dole
The Republicans fortunately didn't re-nominate any of those one-time losers; therefore, Republican Senators fared a dismal 3-7 in elections. Governors and former governors with the Republican nomination compiled a 9-4 record with the only losses in 1916, 1936, 1944, and 1948. Republican nominees who served in neither office managed a 10-5 record.
If people are thinking of voting for a Senator (other than Barack Hussein Obama) tomorrow because only he has a chance of defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton, think again. History tells us that Senators compile a dismal record at winning the Presidency and perform even more dismally in the rare cases when they somehow win.
If the Party stays together unlike 1916 and New Deal-era-style socialism somehow doesn't dominate the American psyche, then we probably can win--if we choose a Governor. If Republicans choose a Senator, however, then we statistically probably will lose and almost certainly will not thrive even if we win.
“Ever get the feelin’ you’ve been cheated?”—Johnny Rotten
Just out of curiosity, how have Democrat senators fared?
Emperor Palpatine was also a Senator.
Slight correction. ...only 3 Republicans who served in the Senate ever got elected to the Presidency directly from the senate. Nixon served in the senate.
I wanna job, I wanna job, I wanna a good job.
Truman is the best that I can think of.
JFK, LBJ no so good.
That’s very true. I vote for the queen. :)
No, not Hillary, LOL
We have no historical marker to stand by here. The society is beyond what could have been imagined. The fact that you are reading this right now is proof.
And Nixon is one of those three Republican Senators who made the Presidency. The others were Benjamin Harrison and Warren Gamaliel Harding.
Senators are still senators. They are the worst of the worst scoundrels. Primping, prancing, panty-waist, posturing phonies, all of them. Couldn’t manage their way out of paper bags. Egomaniacal, largely homosexual, the last thing we need is a senator ascending to the executive.
This is basic US History 101: When electing a Chief Executive, you want someone with Executive branch experience.
That means succesful State Governors. Or maybe a MAJOR City mayor...other than Rudi.
We know. We know. We know.
You would have voted for George McGovern.
I will not argue with any of you’re points. I argue with using historical data as a template.
good post ... how did the democrats fare on that score?
A friend of mine says she won’t vote for former Senators for president she thinks they make bad presidents and have been in Washington way too long......I see her point
I'd vote for Palpatine this year, he would be much better than anything else we are choosing from right now.
McCain is about as tough on Foreign Policy as the next opinion poll.
Nixon signed the EPA law.
You can worship at the McCain shrine all you want. However don't expect anyone who has watched McCain in action to be fooled into following your blind adoration.
Thanks for the new tagline!
right Humphrey and McGovern. Nixon was one of the few Republicans who stuck by Goldwater and campaigned heavily for him in the ‘64 meltdown that’s why he got the second chance in ‘68.
AuH2O.
In your heart, you know he’s right.
Itis high time we overthrow the Republican establishment just as we did in 1980. We need some fresh blood of representatives who actually know what service is all about. Unfortunately, the ones we have today have evolved into Democrats in their lust for power.
McCain has no concept of becoming President to serve the people. He is only doing it for his own legacy. It's all about him.
I’d categorize Nixon as “deeply flawed” rather than outright “sucked”. And Harding? I would have liked to party with that guy.
Grow up.
You will not read one post from me that “worships” McCain. And I do not have “blind adoration” for the man.
McCain may be the bottom of the barrel, but he is the only electable Republicans left.
At least Republicans have both bases covered this time, they can lose with a RINO Senator or lose with a RINO governor, take your choice.
I made my choice after the FL primary, none of the above.
I just ran the numbers for Democrat Senators. They’re better than their Republican counterparts at election, winning a 7-7 record since 1828. Three of those elections (two Senators) were Andrew Jackson, the only Senator ever to serve eight years as President. Still, Democrat Senators have gone 0-5 since their last winner, Lyndon Baines Johnson against Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Democrat Governors are scarcely better, compiling a 13-11 record with Franklin Delano Roosevelt responsible for four o those victories. No Democrat with neither Senatorial nor Gubernatorial experience ever won the Presidency, compiling a walloping 0-7 record, last John William Davis in 1924. [George Brinton McClellan counts as a Governor here, although his election in New Jersey postdated his loss in the 1864 Presidential election by more than a decade.]
What you say is true, but it lacks a cause and effect.
You are describing a correlation, not a causation.
So it does not necessarily hold true for all Republican Senators.
See post 30. Democrat Senators compiled a 7-7 record at Presidential elections, including Andrew Jackson and Harry S. Truman. Among all the men and women of the Senate, only Andrew Jackson and James Monroe served a full eight years as President.
And the bad ones are even worse than that...
In your heart, you know he’s right.
Nixon.
In your guts, you know he's nuts.
Nixon shouldn’t count. He was Vice President which gave him the inside track to the presidency. He wasn’t just a Senator who then made the transition to the presidency. That aspect should be completely thrown out the window.
And once again, in a eerie similarity to Nixon, the democrats will run against him for decades.
The Sin-ate is the biggest joke on the planet.
I'd rather have McCain's liberalism than Romney's liberalism. I know where McCain stands.
I’m trying to convince you that McCain is the LEAST electable of the four Republicans still running for President. I can’t think of any good reason to find him electable. He’s a Senator. Conservative Republicans or even most Republicans won’t be enthusiastic about supporting him, he won’t run a good campaign, every convoluted boring speech and idiotic client-serving vote from his Senate decades will haunt him, and those liberals who flock to him in the primary will go for the real thing when she’s on the ballot.
Either of the Governors on the ballot CAN beat Hillary, might attract some enthusiastic support, lack experience boring audiences to sleep, and can point to leadership and positive accomplishments on the campaign trail. We CAN win with a Governor, but it will take long hard work. Neither of these guys are great, but they don’t have a decade-long record of colluding with those odious Democrat Senators.
Hell, I'd vote for Palpatine any year after what's happened this year!
Warren Harding was a truly excellent President. You should be ashamed to once again recycle endlessly repeated anti-Harding Democratic propaganda. He hand-picked his own cabinet, attracting eminent men such as Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon, and Herbert Hoover. Even the central figure in the Teapot Dome scandal, Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico, was well qualified for the job he was appointed to.
Perhaps the greatest event of Harding’s Presidency was his speech on Oct. 26, 1921, to a segregated crowd in Birmingham, Ala., in which he stated that democracy would always be a sham until African-Americans received full equality in education, employment and political life. Harding was loudly cheered by blacks and met with silent stares from whites.
No American President has been as unfairly maligned as Warren Gamaliel Harding.
Yup... we have our public skools to thank for that.
Yeah yeah, I remember in 1988 when everyone said Bush couldn’t win because no incumbent VP had been elected president since Martin Van Buren, blah blah blah.
All such streaks are just there to be broken eventually.
I thought Nixon was good on foreign policy, but his domestic politics were awful. I don't see how he could have been much worse than a democrat president in that aspect. Nixon probably was a liberal domestically thinking he would be "loved" by the press and rank and file dems. Look how that turned out.
US Senator McCain
US Senator Clinton
US Senator Obama
Mitt Romney
I remember reading how women supposedly swooned over Harding's "handsomeness". I'm not a woman so I can't say, but that guy never struck me as Mr. Movie Star
Sorry, but in my book a "win" with governor Mitt wouldn't be a win AFAIC. I'm an evangelical social, fiscal, and national defense oriented conservative, but Mitt's religion has nothing to do with my opinion of him. The fact is that in spite of all his denials and flip flops Mitt is still a MA liberal who doesn't even know how to think like a conservative would about the issues that matter most to us, and that's a big part of what gives him away when he claims to be one of us. And don't even start with me about McCain, he's been off my list of real Republicans for at least the last dozen years or more.
I have finally gotten my head straight and come to the obvious conclusion that as as long as we conservatives keep giving up our principles and voting for the RINOs who the RNC, the media whores, and northeastern liberal party insiders like Christy Todd Whitman select and try to shove down our throats from behind the primary scenes we will never again see a conservative Republican nominated. They all give flowery lip service to the memory of Reagan as a great man but not to his conservatism, and they have managed to expunge virtually all of his conservative legacy from the party so expertly that not many people realize it's gone.
I will stay registered Republican so I can have a say in local and state elections, but at the national level after almost 50 years of voting straight GOP tickets I no longer consider myself a Republican. I wrote in Duncan Hunter on my vote-in-advance ballot, and I intend to begin a search for a 3rd party candidate who I can vote for with a clear conscience in November. If I live long enough to see an authentic Republican conservative nominated I will climb back on board the GOP bus, but not until then.
In mid-1967, George Romney was running for the Republican Party's presidential nomination.
At the time, all presidential aspirants faced questions about the war in Vietnam. Two years earlier, after touring Vietnam, Romney had declared that American involvement in the Asian war "was morally right and necessary." But as domestic opposition to the war grew, Romney began questioning U.S. policy in Vietnam.
According to presidential historian Theodore H. White, at the beginning of 1967 the press focused on Romney "as the only visible candidate" to challenge LBJ. Owing to Romney's frontrunner status, and the dominance of the war as the issue in the race, the media outlets sought interviews aimed at clarifying his position on Vietnam.
Romney exercised a great deal of caution regarding those requests, but accepted Gordon's offer to appear on his show.
According to historian White, the "brainwashing" comment "was just a toss-away line, nobody thought it significant at the time." Romney, in fact, was so comfortable with the interview he did not even want to hear a playback and immediately left for Lansing. Gordon later added, "I didn't even think much about the statement or consider it very important until the next day when I read the script and saw the word ‘brainwash' in print. Then it hit me."
Criticism of Romney was quick and devastating–a presidential candidate was not supposed to be susceptible to brainwashing. The 1965 tour of Vietnam had included other governors, including Vermont's Phillip Hoff, who called Romney's statement "outrageous, kind of stinking." The Democratic governor added, "Either he's the most naïve man or he lacks judgment." Democratic party chairman John Bailey said that Romney had "insulted the integrity" of General William Westmoreland and former U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge-the men responsible for Romney's briefings. Lodge added, "I never brainwashed anybody in my life."
In the months after appearing on the Lou Gordon Show, Romney's poll numbers stagnated and dropped. After a dismal showing in the February 1968 New Hampshire primary, he withdrew from the presidential race, which Richard Nixon later won. In January 1969, Romney resigned as Michigan governor and entered President Nixon's cabinet as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Romney's comment dogged him even in death. When he died in July 1995, the headline from the Associated Press (AP) read, "George Romney, Who Said Military Brainwashed Him on Vietnam, Dead at 88." The first paragraph of an AP dispatch from Michigan, designed to be favorable, read, "Former Gov. George W. Romney, whose remark that he was brainwashed into supporting the Vietnam War derailed his presidential bid, was remembered as a man who shaped Michigan's political landscape and automotive history." In one of the more intriguing "what ifs," If Romney had not made the brainwashed statement and had won the Republican nomination and then the presidency, how might American history have been different?
Earlier this evening I did some number crunching for the senators who have backed John McCain. Of the 16 who have publicly endorsed McCain, including McCain and Bob Dole, they combined total of 286 years in the United States Senate.
286 Years!
Put another way, 286 years ago, which was 1722, Sam Adams was born.
I do not want a career politician who has spent a quarter of a century in DC, being paid by me, to run this country.
Being elected Vice President is far from an inside track to the Presidency. I think that Nixon and John Adams were the only Vice Presidents to become President without succeeding to the Presidency due to the death of the incumbent.
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