John Coit Spooner Quotes
Direct primaries would destroy the party machinery ... and would build up a lot of personal machines, and would make every man a self-seeker, and would degrade politics by turning candidacies into bitter personal wrangles
Essentially Spooner was correct in his predictions. Only, most people in Wisconsin, and later the nation, saw the existing system of candidates picked by party bosses, to be far worse.
John Coit Spooner, 1843-1919, U. S. Senator (Republican, WI), Speech opposing the movement to nominate candidates by having primary elections instead of party officials decide, 1897
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Republican Party primary elections had become very contentious. The radical right and the Tea Party, though a minority of the party, had the power to destroy almost any Republican candidate’s chances. So those Republican political candidates were forced to pander to the extreme right and then try and backtrack to the center for the general election. As a result, few people believed the statements of Republican office seekers as no one knew what they really believed including members of their own party, Bush, no longer running for any political position, found himself with much more credibility and influence in the party than those who were running for office. The problem of appealing to party extremes was not unique to the Republicans at that time, but the degree and extent was unprecedented accounting for the distrust.
Abraham Lincoln was the only third party candidate to win the presidency in U.S. history. However, when he was nominated, there was little conviction among Republicans that a third or fourth party could actually win:. Lincoln's primary opponent, William H. Seward
He was discussing the Presidential Primary Race.
In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become very critical of organized and orthodox religion of all kinds.
Most Americans who felt this way about the 2011 Congress playing “chicken” with the full faith and credit of the United States did not realize that although 2011 had reached a new low, the problem has existed throughout the republic’s existence. Here Ms. Roosevelt complained about the same thing.
In 2012, the Republican party had shifted to the right and was split between two factions. None of the 4 leading candidates had the support of a majority of the activist Republicans who vote in Primary elections. The then started to vie with each other for the most conservative elements of the party and did so by attacking the other candidates, making moral pronouncements and attacking President Obama. None of them offered any positive programs or solutions to the problems they claimed existed, and the attacks on the others were always that they were “really not conservative” and “could not get elected.” The result was that all the candidates negatives rose.
Most candidates who drop out of primary elections run out of money. If a candidate ever admits that he might quit, no one would give him any money and he would be forced to quit. Therefore almost all candidates lie about this in primary elections. Candidates like Ron Paul are an exception as they do not need much money to campaign, but those are few.
John Coit Spooner was a politician and lawyer from Wisconsin. He served in the United States Senate from 1885 to 1891 and from 1897 to 1907. A Republican, by the 1890s, he was one of the "Big Four" key Republicans who largely controlled the major decisions of the Senate, along with Orville H. Platt of Connecticut, William B. Allison of Iowa and Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island.
