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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow an Outsider President Killed a Party ... here's to hope for a repeat
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/history-campaign-politics-zachary-taylor-killed-whigs-political-party-213935How an Outsider President Killed a Party
The Whigs chose power over principles when they nominated Zachary Taylor in 1848. The party never recovered.
By GIL TROY June 02, 2016
It was summer, and a major U.S. political party had just chosen an inexperienced, unqualified, loutish, wealthy outsider with ambiguous party loyalties to be its presidential nominee. Some party luminaries thought he would help them win the general election. But many of the faithful were furious and mystified: How could their party compromise its ideals to such a degree?
...
Still, many Whig loyalists mistrusted Taylor. He was crude, nonpartisan, unpresidential. Ohio Senator Thomas Corwin wondered how sleeping 40 years in the woods and cultivating moss on the calves of his legs qualified Taylor for the presidency. The great senator and former Secretary of State Daniel Webster called Taylor an illiterate frontier colonel who hasnt voted for 40 years. Webster was so contemptuous he refused backroom deals to become Taylors running mate (unknowingly missing a chance to become president when Taylor died during his first term). Indeed, the biographer Holman Hamilton would pronounce Taylor one of the strangest presidential candidates in all our annals the first serious White House contender in history without the slightest experience in any sort of civil government.
By the spring of 1848, now hungering for the nomination, Taylor tried mollifying these partisans. He professed his party loyalty in a ghostwritten letter that his brother-in-law John Allison knew to leak to the public. Still wary of making pledges, and boasting of his ignorance of political details, Taylor declared, I am a Whig, but not an ultra Whig in his first Allison Letter of April 22, 1848.
The Whigs chose power over principles when they nominated Zachary Taylor in 1848. The party never recovered.
By GIL TROY June 02, 2016
It was summer, and a major U.S. political party had just chosen an inexperienced, unqualified, loutish, wealthy outsider with ambiguous party loyalties to be its presidential nominee. Some party luminaries thought he would help them win the general election. But many of the faithful were furious and mystified: How could their party compromise its ideals to such a degree?
...
Still, many Whig loyalists mistrusted Taylor. He was crude, nonpartisan, unpresidential. Ohio Senator Thomas Corwin wondered how sleeping 40 years in the woods and cultivating moss on the calves of his legs qualified Taylor for the presidency. The great senator and former Secretary of State Daniel Webster called Taylor an illiterate frontier colonel who hasnt voted for 40 years. Webster was so contemptuous he refused backroom deals to become Taylors running mate (unknowingly missing a chance to become president when Taylor died during his first term). Indeed, the biographer Holman Hamilton would pronounce Taylor one of the strangest presidential candidates in all our annals the first serious White House contender in history without the slightest experience in any sort of civil government.
By the spring of 1848, now hungering for the nomination, Taylor tried mollifying these partisans. He professed his party loyalty in a ghostwritten letter that his brother-in-law John Allison knew to leak to the public. Still wary of making pledges, and boasting of his ignorance of political details, Taylor declared, I am a Whig, but not an ultra Whig in his first Allison Letter of April 22, 1848.
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How an Outsider President Killed a Party ... here's to hope for a repeat (Original Post)
etherealtruth
Jan 2017
OP
Things were different then, in 1848, the Whig party was in it's 15th year, it only lasted 21 years.
braddy
Jan 2017
#2
There are parallels ... I am firm in my belief that tRump will take down the
etherealtruth
Jan 2017
#3
ret5hd
(20,491 posts)1. Thnx...there is hope.
braddy
(3,585 posts)2. Things were different then, in 1848, the Whig party was in it's 15th year, it only lasted 21 years.
etherealtruth
(22,165 posts)3. There are parallels ... I am firm in my belief that tRump will take down the
... the republican party.
it may be wishful thinking ... but its what i have
uponit7771
(90,339 posts)4. I pray this part of history is repeated by the KGOP, hugging MiniPootin should be a death nail
etherealtruth
(22,165 posts)5. You and me!
I think we are seeing evidence in trumps first few days