William Howard Taft Quotes
I have one consolation, No candidate was ever elected ex-president by such a large majority.
Taft had a very good sense of humor even when he was self-depricating.
William Howard Taft, 1857-1930, 27th President of the United States (Republican, OH), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Referring to his disastrous defeat in the 1912 presidential election
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Utley made the statement on election night of 1948 when HG Kaltenborn and must other pundits observed that Truman’s early lead was not big enough to overcome the results of the rural precincts which were slower to report and most assumed went heavily for Dewey. Utley, however, had conducted his own exit poll in the Chicago region and found that people who supported Dewey, when they got into the voting booth just could not support him. He appears to be the first journalist to call the election for Truman.
Al Gore had substantially won the popular vote but needed Florida to win the electoral vote. There had been a series of vote counting irregularities with many people being denied the right to vote to the point that no one was sure who had won Florida. The election moved from the ballot box to the courts and the Florida Supreme Court ruled that there should be some recounts in areas where Bush had supposedly won. The Bush forces and the Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court where the judges all reversed their traditional positions to support the party who had nominated them. Liberals who usually voted to have the Federal government override the states, voted for Florida to be upheld. Conservatives who usually supported the right of the States to decide such things without Federal Interference, voted to overturn the State Supreme Court. There were 5 Republicans and 6 Democrats and George W. Bush won the election by one judge’s vote.
He saw Obama’s name as a fatal problem with the American Electorate which turned out to be more tolerant than Brown gave them credit for.
The irony of this statement is that Kennedy then selected Lyndon Johnson as his running mate. Johnson, most experts agree, was able to swing Texas into the Democratic tally, and many of those same experts generally agree with Kennedy’s point but believe that his election was the only exception to the general rule in modern times.
Democratic Speaker of the Oklahoma House Jim Barker was so heavy-handed that his own party members combined to unseat him:
This appears to be the first time in American history where the losing opposition did not at least claim that they wanted to work with the elected president to better the country. In this case, the partisanship was so bad that the major goal of the Republicans was to do what they could to have the president fail in his first term. To achieve their objective, the Republicans opposed almost every presidential legislative initiative of Obama’s including those that they had supported in previous ones. In several cases, the President proposed to accept previous Republican programs and ideas, and must Republicans then voted against the proposal so that they could deny the president any legislative success even if it moved the Republican programmatic agenda ahead. The Strategy worked in the sense that that Congress passed fewer bills that any in history, but failed to keep Obama from a second term. While the voters were not happy that the President was not able to persuade the Republicans to compromise and pass needed legislation, enough of them realized that the Republicans were more responsible, and reelected the President. The constant opposition to anything Obama advocated and the drumbeat of accusations against him drove his public approval numbers way down. In the process the Republicans drove their own approval percentage under 10 percent. The Republicans followed McConnell’s leadership, hurt the President badly, hurt themselves worse, and hurt the country.
Donald Trump had won the presdiency by winning a majority of the votes of the Electoral College. However his opponent Hillary Clinton garnered about 2 million more votes. Several other presidents have won with a minority vote. These occurances did not affect the Presidents' legitimacy as the Electoral College was specified in the Constitution, However, it did undercut the concept that the President had a mandate. Other presidents just carried on and either earded the respect of the majoprity of AMericans or did not over time. Howevewr, Trump, who was so sensitive and fragile about his image, kept responding to comedians like Bee by claiming that the only reason he lost the poular vote was voter fraud by illegal immigrants. However he never offered any evidence of such and there were no convictions for same or even arrests and trials.
On that date, a few days before the election the FBI Director publicly announced that he was reopening the Investigation into possible wrongdoing of Ms. Clinon's use of provate emails. He had earlier cleared her of all criminal wrongdoing and and he claimed that they had found a new computer that had some e-mails that they had not not yet examined for possible criminal activity. In addition WikiLeaks published on the Internet thousands of private e-mails that the Russians had hacked from her campaign chairman and her comittee. The two things started moving her trend down so that she only one the popular vote by almsot 3 million votes and she needed more to overcome the electoral collage gave to rural and small states. Ironically, the FBI went throught the contents of the computer and after the election announced that there was nothing there that incriminated Ms. Clinton, and there was no criminal activity found in all the hacked e-mails. And the FBI Director was chastized by the Republican Justice Department after Donald Trump took office for improperly making pubic investigation details before there were any findings. The FBI Director was subsequently fired but this and otehr reasons were given as the reason.
William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913) and the tenth Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.