American History Revised (49 page)

Turn the clock back to 1824, to a very clever, conniving plan to win the presidency. The candidate, John C. Calhoun, desperately wanted to be president of the United States. But he had a slight problem: there were four other men in the race, all better known than he: John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Crawford. What to do?

A brilliant thinker, he devised a plan daring in its audacity. And, scary to say, it almost worked.

Betting that the four leading candidates
would be so evenly split that neither the Electoral College nor the House of Representatives would be able to reach a decision, Calhoun figured the congressmen would have no choice, as inauguration day loomed, but to turn to the vice president–elect and name him president. So Calhoun dropped out of the presidential race and offered his support to Adams in return for the vice presidency; Adams accepted. Calhoun then went to Jackson and made the same deal; Jackson, too, accepted. Calhoun was now halfway home; all he had to do was pray for an impasse.

As Calhoun predicted, neither Adams nor Jackson won enough votes to clinch victory. But when Henry Clay threw his support behind Adams, Adams secured just enough votes to win the presidency and deprive his vice president–elect of the presidency by default.

An aberration? Hardly. Move up the clock to our nation’s most pivotal election, 1860, when a man who wasn’t even running—Joseph Lane (ever heard of him?)—almost became president of the United States. The game plan was as follows: with the Republican candidate, Lincoln, sure to win the free states and most likely the Electoral College, the southern states and the Democrats all banded together to make a last-ditch effort to win the biggest state, New York. Had they done so, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives, where the winner would have been a wild toss-up: Lincoln, Breckenridge, or—most likely—a tie, in which case there would be no winner and the election would have to proceed to the Senate to elect the winning vice president, who, because there was no president, would automatically become president. Because the Democrats controlled the Senate, the new president would not have been the Republican candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, but the Democratic candidate for vice president, Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon.

So much, thank God, for diabolical plans to win the presidency. But as we shall now see, further surprises were in store.

1789–2004
Every four years political columnists toss up the ultimate horror: the possibility of a popularly elected president not winning because of the “archaic” Electoral College.

Actually, this has only happened twice: in 1888, when Grover Cleveland won a majority of the popular votes but lost the electoral vote to Benjamin Harrison, and in 2000, when Gore lost to Bush. (The other two controversial elections were 1824 and 1876, when the popular-vote winner also had the majority of electoral votes and still did not get to the White House: the problem lay not with the Electoral College, but elsewhere—namely, with conniving politicians.)

In every other election the Electoral
College winner and the popular-vote winner have been the same, and have gotten into the White House. Even for Grover Cleveland, who might have felt he got a raw deal, the system worked. He simply waited four years and ran again in 1892, beating Harrison in the second go-round. (As for A1 Gore, the same might have happened for him given Bush’s declining popularity ratings in 2004, but he chose to withdraw from politics, thereby revealing the one trait that caused him to lose in the first try: being too cautious and risk-averse, as when he eschewed Bill Clinton’s help in his campaign.)

What, then, does the Electoral College accomplish? According to the historian Kenneth Davis, the Electoral College “makes it almost impossible for a third-party candidate to mount a serious challenge to the major party candidates.”
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If so, then the Founding Fathers would have been very pleased. The issue for them was not political parties—there were no parties then—but rather that the presidency be occupied by a man representing the will of the people. Other than George Washington as a candidate, there was little else to go on. Said Benjamin Franklin to his fellow Constitutional Convention delegates, “The first man at the helm will be a good one. Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.”

Indeed, the Founding Fathers were terrified about two possibilities: that an obscure politician would come out of nowhere and win the presidency, or that the office would be occupied by someone who was not popularly elected.

History has proven their worst fears true on several occasions—none of them having to do with the Electoral College:

• In 1852 and in 1976, an obscure politician won the presidency by taking advantage of weak requirements for winning the party nomination: Franklin Pierce and Jimmy Carter (in both cases, the parties subsequently changed the rules to prevent a recurrence).
  

• In 1974, there being no vice president, and the president having to resign in disgrace, Gerald Ford was “appointed” president by his disgraced predecessor (and to turn the Constitution even more upside-down, the new vice president also was unelected—appointed by the appointed).
  

Before we pass judgment on the much-maligned Electoral College—“it is impossible to explain to foreigners; even Americans don’t understand it,” says Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—we should remember its historical purpose and what
has been accomplished. The Founding Fathers did not think one man could win a majority against several candidates, and therefore the election would have to be determined by a vote in the House of Representatives (again, the idea was to choose a clear, popularly elected winner). When the rules were changed in 1800, separating the voting for the president from that for the vice president, the House of Representatives assumed particular prominence in the “crooked deal” of 1824, when it elected Adams over Jackson. But Jackson, like Cleveland sixty-four years later, got his revenge in the proper manner: he ran again in another four years and won.

In sum, the presidency has been taken by three people who lacked the popular following the Founding Fathers desired. In addition, the office has been denied to three other people who should have been given it because of their popular vote. However, two of them did eventually get it (and so, too, might have the third one, but he got sick and died: Tilden).

Many people will be surprised, but a careful reading of history shows the following statement to be true:
In no case has the Electoral College mechanism failed to prevent a determined man from reaching the White House.
If a candidate feels he got a raw deal, he should try again, like Grover Cleveland.

In the meantime we can thank the Electoral College for what it has really accomplished in balancing the lesser power of the small states against the clout of the large states. This conflict between the will of the majority versus the rights of the minority is the most difficult challenge facing any government (witness post-Saddam Iraq). The genius of our Founding Fathers in creating the longest-lasting continuous government in the past three thousand years was their ability to address this conflict. Along with the tripartite form of government and bicameral legislature, stands the Electoral College. Cumbersome, yes, but it works.

Critics of our Electoral College focus on the wrong danger. They should look at the possibility that the best candidate might not get the nomination in the first place, thereby depriving the electorate a chance to choose between the two most qualified individuals. “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” may be bad enough (or good enough), but what about other candidates in the wings?

It is fun to weigh the qualifications of the two nominees and wonder if the American people (and the Electoral College) made the right choice. Irving Wallace wrote a magnificent book on this subject in the 1960s, titled
They Also Ran
, exploring many presidential races and suggesting that in quite a few cases it was the lesser candidate who won. Significantly, almost all these unfortunate cases occurred in the nineteenth century, when no doubt we had a string of mediocrities before and after the Civil War. But that
was well over a hundred years ago, when nominations were in the hands of political bosses and therefore not applicable today. In the twentieth century, out of a choice of two, it can be argued that the better man has won in almost all cases.

There was one election, however, in which the clear best candidate never got a chance to run. Despite his impressive résumé of relevant work experience, his high visibility among the voters, and his obvious vote-getting power (he had won every political office he’d run for, including the presidency), he was rejected by the bosses of the Republican Party and denied the nomination. Had the nomination been his, he would have won the presidency again.

He was Theodore Roosevelt in 1911. Unable to dislodge William Howard Taft, he ran as a third-party candidate and came in second, ahead of Taft, with 27 percent of the vote. Had he been renominated by his party, he would have beaten Wilson.

1792
Our first president was very fortunate to get the nod as the lead standard-bearer. He didn’t get it because of his widespread popularity; to the contrary, he barely squeaked through, making it only because he came from a pivotal state.

After the skirmishes of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the colonists found themselves in total disarray in their rebellion against Britain. The Army of Massachusetts succeeded in surrounding the British army in Boston, but lacked enough troops to capture the city. General Artemis Ward called for reinforcements from the seacoast towns of the four New England provinces; all said no, they were saving their local militia to defend themselves against possible invasion by the fearsome British navy.

The Southern colonies were no more anxious to send troops. Yet if a war was to be fought, said Benjamin Franklin, it had to be fought by all thirteen colonies acting together.

The immediate task facing the Continental Congress in Philadelphia was to choose a commander-in-chief. The leading candidates were John Hancock, Charles Lee, Horatio Gates, and Artemis Ward. Hancock was the leading politician of the day, and Lee, Gates, and Ward were outstanding generals. Also in the running, but merely as a dark horse, was a colonel from Virginia named George Washington. A member of the Continental Congress, Washington started showing up for sessions resplendently dressed in his military uniform, sending indirect messages to his fellow delegates: “Choose me! Choose me!”

Not everyone bought his act. Observed one of the other delegates from Washington’s state of Virginia: “Although a decent man, he had lost every battle he had been in.”

The kingmaker of the congress was John Adams, the spokesman for New England and the one most desperate for help. He chose Washington for one reason and one reason only: Washington came from a colony vital to the New England revolutionary cause.