Most Democrats are pretty eager to see the celebutard pageant queen with the avant-garde language skills, Sarah Palin, lead the Republican Party off a cliff, but history suggests she won't be in the spotlight much longer, and will not be leading anybody anywhere.
Do you know who the dyspeptic-looking gent above is? That's William L. Dayton, who ran as John Fremont's vice-presidential candidate on the very first Republican ticket in 1856. They lost, to Democrats James Buchanan and John C. Breckenridge. After the election, Dayton, a former senator from New Jersey, held some important jobs, including New Jersey Attorney General and U.S. Minister to France under Abraham Lincoln, but he never attracted so much as a whiff of support for the nomination as president or even vice-president again.
This is pretty typical. Losing veep candidates do not go on to the presidency. Losing presidential candidates can, like Dick Nixon did, but even that's pretty rare. Veeps? Never. Well, there was one, but it took him 12 years to get back on the ticket.
Don't believe me? Here's some more:
Joseph Lane, George Hunt Pendleton, Francis Preston Blair, Jr., B. Gratz Brown, Thomas Andrews, William Hayden English, John Alexander Logan, Allen Granberry Thurman, James Gaven Field, Arthur Sewall, Adlai Ewing Stevenson (grandfather of the later presidential candidate, and himself a former vice president, which isn't the same thing), Henry Gassaway Davis, John Worth Kern, Hiram Johnson and Nicholas Murray Butler, Charles W. Fairbanks, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (our sole exception; lost in 1920, ran again and won, on the top of the ticket this time, in 1932), Charles W. Bryan, Joseph Taylor Robinson, Charles Curtis, Frank Knox, Charles L. McNary, John W. Bricker, Earl Warren (later Supreme Court justice, but don't tell Sarah that!), John Sparkman, Estes Kefauver, Henry Cabot Lodge, William E. Miller, Ed Muskie, Sargent Shriver, Bob Dole (who did later run for president, but was very instructively beaten), Walter Mondale (ditto, and another former veep), Geraldine Ferraro, Lloyd Bentsen, Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Joe Lieberman, and John Edwards.
And now Ms. Palin.
I wouldn't get your hopes up.
Besides, if she doesn't shut up soon, I think some of her fellow Republican governors are going to take her out to the pool and drown her.
6 comments:
She should be forced to asphyxiate herself.
This is good news!
Interesting take – but FDR kinda spoils it. By my rough count, he is 1 out of 39, which is probably better than the rate for former senators, generals…
At least one from your loser list couldn’t even win the Senate, granted Fritz Mondale only had a week to campaign after the death of Paul Wellstone. And so now we here in Minnesota are busy attending recount-observer training and hoping for a turnover. Should we take heart from your experience with Gregoire?
I wonder if any of those people, FDR included, ever rocked their base like Palin does. I doubt any of them were good looking and charming* enough to fool a large number of people into not looking at them any harder. It's hard to use history as a gauge when there has not been a ticket like McCain/Palin before.
* I don't think she's the least bit charming, but a lot of people apparently don't see it my way.
Joseph Lane, the Oregon Democrat and pro-Southern sympathizer, is a distant relative of mine. What a list of miscreants and thwarted grubbers these V-P candidates are! You forgot Richard Alf, the one-time V-P of the splinter Silver Democrats in 1904. He was also a novelist and wrote a truly strange book called NO SKIN OFF OF MY MOUNTAINS. Could Ms. Palin do something like that?
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