By Edwin Cooney
Monday night, August 12th, 1974 was a hot, sticky
night in Washington, D.C. as Gerald Rudolph Ford, our newly minted president,
stood for the first time before his many friends and colleagues in the 93rd
Congress. Jerry had something to
confess that night, but since I’m writing this column and he’s not, I’m going
to make my confessions first before relating what his confession was. As much as I insist that memorizing
dates isn’t essential to learning about or enjoying history, the truth is that
I love dates. Dates, the
historical ones that is, are markers in the study and enjoyment of history that
can lead a person, intellectually and emotionally, from one concept or story to
another thus bringing history to life. Here are some examples:
As many of you are aware, presidential and midterm federal
elections are by law held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in every
November of a year divisible by four, so there are eight dates in November on
which we may elect a president.
The dates are November 2nd through November 8th. Twelve years ago, which was five years
before I began writing these weekly musings, I wrote an article that was never
published called “The Seventh Son of November Seventh.” It was about the possible fortune of
George W. Bush, the candidate I had not voted for, as he prepared to take up
his presidential duties on January 20th, 2001.
I speculated on his presidential future by comparing and
contrasting the experiences of the six presidents who had preceded him to the
White House who were elected on November 7th. Four years ago, I wrote a column called
“The Eighth Son of November 4th” in which I noted that, like five of
his November 4th predecessors, Barack Obama as a presidential candidate
represented a state other than his native one. I also did a little comparison
of the events that had occurred during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1800),
Andrew Jackson (1828), James Buchanan (1856), Grover Cleveland (1884), Calvin
Coolidge (1924), Dwight Eisenhower (1956), and Ronald Reagan (1980), all men
elected on a November 4th before President-elect Obama.
Today, approximately six weeks after his re-election by a
vote of 65,599,965 to Mitt Romney’s 60,861,735, Barack Obama officially becomes
the tenth president elected on November 6th. In 1792, George Washington was
re-elected president as was Thomas Jefferson on November 6th,
1804. In 1832, it was Andrew
Jackson’s turn to be re-elected president on November 6th. On November 6th, 1860,
Americans living north of the Mason-Dixon Line voted to give Abraham Lincoln a
crack at being president after having served only one term as an Illinois
Congressman from 1847 to 1849.
Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and Herbert Hoover in 1928 are the two lesser
presidential lights against which President Obama may be linked as a son of
November 6th. However,
William McKinley, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan—-re-elected in 1900, 1956
and 1984 respectively—are indeed formidable acts to follow. Jefferson, Jackson, Eisenhower and
Reagan were generally regarded as less effective in their second terms than in
their first four years, but some of that analysis is a bit partisan.
President Obama’s recent victory is in stark contrast to
most people’s analyses just one year ago as to what was likely to happen in
2012. The Republicans were
covering their substantial ideological differences by asserting that it would
be “…anybody but Obama in 2012.”
Conservative talk show hosts were asserting that no president with an
unemployment level above seven percent had ever been re-elected. What they
weren’t asserting however was that the unemployment rate in 1984 when Mr.
Reagan sought re-election was 7.2 percent. Still, the president prevailed on November 6th,
2012. The rest, of course, is up
to him.
If the legacies of seven of the nine men who preceded him
after November 6th to Pennsylvania Avenue’s most famous address are
any indication (Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley, Eisenhower,
and Reagan), Barack Obama could have quite a successful second term. However, if the performances of
Benjamin Harrison and Herbert Hoover are the real indicator of the future, the
president himself might wish he had rested on his laurels and taken a cushy job
with a well-heeled liberal policy think-tank.
My second confession is that, fascinated as I am with dates,
I didn’t realize that in 1788 George Washington wasn’t voted into office in
November. In the ten states that participated
in our first presidential election, the voting took place between Monday,
December 15th, 1788 and Saturday, January 10th,
1789. Washington was unanimously
elected with 69 electoral votes and received a popular vote of just 38,818 in
the six states that held popular elections. I wasn’t aware of that bit of historical date trivia until I
began my research for this article.
As for President Ford’s confession on that historic August
night, it had to do with what we today call “earmarks.” Looking over at House Speaker Carl
Albert of Oklahoma, President Ford, who was about to ask a Democratic Congress
to restrain its big spending habits, confessed that as a member of the House,
he had often voted for worthwhile spending projects for his Grand Rapids,
Michigan constituency while voting against “wasteful boondoggles" in
Oklahoma.
If it can be argued that dates and circumstances are mere
historic trivia, it can also be persuasively argued I believe that what often
appears trivial may ultimately provide the key for making sense out of it all.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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