Donald Trump Quotes

“Waving the bloody shirt” was a term that some Southerners accused Northern post Civil War politicians of inflaming Northern public opinion by relating incidents of Northerners who wanted to help uphold the equal rights of Blacks in the South and were murdered by the Klu Klux Klan and waving a bloodstained shirt belonging to the dead martyr. There never was an incident that could be documented of actually waving a bloody shirt. But many Northern politicians related events of Southern lynchings and other assaults on Blacks and Whites who were guilty of nothing but claiming lawful rights for Negroes. Northerners who remembered the Civil War and the atrocities and war crimes of Andersonville and Quantrill’s Raiders when they heard these speeches were outraged and angry. This created much anti-Southern attitudes in the North and the West some of which exist to this day.

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.

Obama won. But this quotation illustrates one the many racist attacks made against America’s first Black President. Obama’s father had been born in Kenya, his mother and he in the United States.

Mrs. Roosevelt, on her own, would criticize the ethics of certain campaign techniques and would criticize them. However she doesn’t say publicly which party she was chastising—her Democrats or the Republicans. And she starts by honestly stating that both parties do this and she tells the readers that it is the campaign headquarters who go to these extremes. Her technique was very effective in that the political operatives who released the sleazy material knew who they were, and realized that if they kept doing it, people would find out that they were the villains. Very often they just stopped, and that was what Mrs. Roosevelt wanted. She wrote this two months before the Presidential elections without every checking with the campaign staff and leaders who read it in the newspapers every day like everyone else. Needless to say that they were not happy, but the President was fine with it and she has had more independence of action and writing than any First Lady in history. She even disagreed with the President slightly sometimes, but usually she was very supportive of FDR and the New Deal. It is hard for us years after to realize that she had a newspaper column published every day in papers throughout the country, she had a regular radio show. Her views reached more Americans every day than the President’s and the campaign staff’s. Her husband was elected to 4 terms—more than any other American President, and yet until Hillary Clinton, no first lady every had gotten overtly involved with public campaigning and political communications, and Mrs. Clinton was nowhere near as active or independent as Mrs. Roosevelt.

He was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson who wrote many of his own speeches but so many are required a modern president and candidate must have speechwriters.

While this is generally true, there have been times where one candidate has been so unattractive, corrupt, or unsavory -- or was closely alighted with such an unpopular figure --that the opponent won without a message just concentrating on the negative aspects of the opponent.