was asked to give a series of public talks about presidential elections, 1992 included. In putting together these lectures, I discovered things I had forgotten about the history I had lived through, and realized how elections through modern history connect to and feed back on one another.
My time on the campaign trail and in Washington had spurred me to become a scholar of American politics and policy. With this project, things have come full circle.
As I witnessed the scene on the lawn of the Governor’s Mansion that July day, I had little understanding of the broader forces that propelled its possibility and its ultimate trajectory. This was a political moment made possible by cultural and political changes that had been decades in the making: economic and geographic realignments, the rise of a new generation of Democratic centrists and Reagan Revolutionaries, the restructuring of the media and the rise of cable television, the ascendance of professional political consultants. It built on the experiences and triumphs and failures of the 50 elections that had come before it. It was a reflection of history, and history in the making. There are many of these moments, in every campaign. They are pivotal to the election at hand, yet possible because of broader historical shifts.
The purpose of this book is to make these connections.
Introduction
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union.
—Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 68, 1788
The newspapers were merciless. One candidate for president was a “libertine” with a “lust for power.” He and his followers were “discontented hotheads” who had “long endeavored to destroy the Federal Constitution.” If he was elected, warned one political adversary, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will all be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of distress, the soil will be soaked with blood.”1 Similarly sharp language zinged back toward his opponent, the embattled incumbent. The sitting president was a man of “limited talents” who was not a defender of democracy, but the head of a “monarchic, aristocratic, tory faction” that only cared about the rich and powerful elite.2
As the election got tighter, the allegations became more personal. Drawing-room whispers about the challenger’s affairs with his female slaves became printed denunciations of his “Congo Harem.” His earlier expressions of religious tolerance stoked allegations that he was a “howling atheist” who would confiscate the Bibles of God-fearing people. Perhaps the lowest blows of the campaign fell on the incumbent, whom one scribe accused of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”3
Although modern conventional wisdom has it that American presidential elections are nastier and more polarizing than ever, few recent elections can compare with the down-and-dirty partisan warfare on display in the election of 1800. The targets of all this mudslinging: Federalist president John Adams and his Democratic-Republican challenger Thomas Jefferson, two now-beloved architects of the American Revolution.
Once great friends, the men had become bitter political enemies with profoundly different views about how the young nation might reach its destiny. On the one hand, Adams and his Federalist allies believed that the future of the young nation was in its cities and in commerce, and it needed a strong central government to do things like acquire new territories and regulate foreign trade. On the other, Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans believed that the heart and soul of the United States was in the agricultural countryside, and that all should be done to protect the independent interests of the yeoman farmer. Geography divided them as well. The Federalists had strongholds in the towns and cities of the North; the Democratic-Republicans drew support from the slave-owning South and the hardscrabble Western frontier.
The stakes in 1800 seemed extraordinarily high. In the first years of the new republic, the two-party system as we know it today did not exist, and there was a reason for that absence. Many of the Founding Fathers believed partisan elections did more harm than good. “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party,” George Washington had remarked as he left office in 1796, “are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”4 The election of 1800 was only the nation’s second partisan election, and the first that resulted in a turnover of the presidency from one party to another. The toxic campaigning and divided polity resulted in a deadlocked election that had to be decided by the House of Representatives barely two weeks before Inauguration Day. Jefferson won, and called his victory over the incumbent “the Revolution of 1800.”5 While subsequent observers have argued over the degree to which the moment truly was a “revolution,” the election precipitated the passage of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which took the responsibility of breaking a deadlock away from the politics of the House and established a separate, ostensibly nonpartisan Electoral College.
In the two centuries since, many presidential election contests have provided ample evidence that partisan politicking can bring out the worst in human nature. Personal attacks, apocalyptic pronouncements, and intricate political machinations have been hallmarks of nearly every competitive presidential race. The growth of modern media has further amplified the less appealing qualities of the American electoral process. By the time it was completed, the 2012 presidential contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had lasted more than two years, involved campaign expenditures of close to $2 billion, unleashed thousands of television hours of vitriolic campaign advertising and political punditry, and lit up the Internet with heated commentary and name-calling.
Yet the Obama-Romney race also demonstrated that—just as in 1800—the American democratic system could withstand the blows of partisan warfare. In referring to the election that made him president as “the revolution of 1800,” Jefferson believed that the basic freedoms for which the American Revolution had been fought were imperiled by the rise of the Federalist Party and its leaders like Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who had advocated for a stronger central government, trading relationships with Great Britain, and more limited democracy. Jefferson saw his election as bringing about a restoration of the founding principles of limited government and individual liberties. Power moved from one party to another without a drop of blood being shed. It was, in his mind, the true culmination of the revolution of 1776.
Historians have since argued over the degree to which 1800 was as significant a turning point as Jefferson liked to portray it, and debates continue to rage over whether his small-government vision was, in fact, truly the Founders’ intent. What is indisputable, however, is that a fiercely contested election did not shatter the fragile new republic, as some observers worried. Candidates fought, political operatives schemed, but the system survived and thrived.6
More than that, elections from the age of George Washington to the age of Barack Obama have showed the power of presidential contests to provoke and inspire mass engagement of ordinary citizens in the political system. Elections are expressions of national identity, and mirrors of individual desires and priorities. No matter how frustrated or disinterested voters might be about politics and government, every four years the attention of the nation—and the world—focuses on the candidates, the contest, and the issues. As elections have become tighter, and the money spent on them greater, attention and enthusiasm about them has increased rather than decreased. George Washington may not have approved, but the partisan election process has been a way for a messy, jumbled, raucous nation to
