Election Threat Quotes
The '44 referred to the 1844 election of James K. Polk as president.
The George W. Bush administration was trying to get its prescription drug plan through the House, but when the voting time ran out they did not have enough votes. The Republican leadership, for the first time in American Congressional history would not let the vote end and kept it open for another 3 hours while they persuaded some members to switch their vote. Smith was one of those. He had announced his retirement and his son was running for his seat. Tom Delay promised to support and campaign for his son, if Smith would switch his vote. Cunningham who was being given funds from companies, threatened to finance an opponent and hurt his son’s chances. In addition Cunningham was taking large bribes to steer contracts to incompetent contractors.
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.
In 1952 Eisenhower was President of Columbia University and Senator Robert Taft – “Mr. Republican” – was the leading Republican politician with ambitions for the Presidency. Taft however was an extreme isolationist. Some Republicans were urging Eisenhower to run to prevent the country from going in that direction. Eisenhower tried another method.
