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Campaigning for the presidency demands strength and courage. Teddy Roosevelt was once shot in the chest just before a campaign speech--but he insisted on delivering his hour-and-a-half oration anyway. Presidential nominees have to know how to play the game, moreover, whether they care for it or not. When Andrew Jackson was visiting one town, according to a campaign tale, a proud mother handed a dirty-faced baby up for him to hold. "Here is a beautiful specimen of young American childhood," said Jackson obligingly. "Note the brightness of that eye, the great strength of those limbs, and the sweetness of those lips." Then he handed the baby to his friend John Eaton. "Kiss him, Eaton," he cried, and walked away. And all presidential hopefuls have to find ways of smoothing over the unfortunate gaffes they sometimes commit. During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton provoked so much mirth when he said he once tried marijuana but found he couldn't inhale, that he subsequently appeared on television to play his saxophone and told the host he took up the instrument because it didn't require inhaling: "You blow out."
Now, in a revised and updated edition, this enlightening and endlessly entertaining book unveils the whole history of American presidential elections from Washington to Clinton--those clamorous showdowns that have so perplexed, pleased, amused, irked, and fascinated the American people from the very beginning. As Charles Dickens observed, American voters are scarcely finished with one campaign when they start in on another.
Presidential Campaigns brings these boisterous contests to life in all their richness and complexity. In the old days, Boller shows, campaigns were much rowdier than they are today. Back in the nineteenth century, the invective at election time was exuberant and the mudslinging unrestrained; a candidate might be called everything from a carbuncle-faced old drunkard to a howling atheist. But there was plenty of fun and games, too, with songs, slogans, rallies, leaflets, torchlight parades, picnics, and, inescapably, a lot of hyperbolic oratory, livening up the scene as party workers sought to get people to the polls. Despite the mudslinging and hot air, however, many of the campaigns touched off popular debates about vital public issues, and there were many candidates (like Adlai E. Stevenson in 1952) who insisted on "talking sense to the American people." Presidential Campaigns takes note of the serious side of the elections even as it documents the frenzy, the frolic, and the sleaze. Each chapter contains a brief essay describing every election from 1789 to 1992, and then presents some "campaign highlights"--songs, poems, slogans, jokes, and anecdotes--that help bring to life the quadrennial confrontation in all its shame and glory.
Presidential Campaigns makes one thing clear: the "great American shindig" (as one Englishman called it) is, for all its shortcomings, an essential part of the American democratic system and, for better or for worse, tells us much about ourselves.
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By K.A.Goldberg (Chicago)
This is a readable and informative history of Presidential politics. Devoting one chapter to each election since 1789 (George Washington), author Paul Boller provides a crisp overview, followed by a host of trivial facts and tidbits. Readers get a good view of U.S. poltiical history, personalities like Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan, etc., and key issues such as slavery, railroads, robber barons, war, peace, communism, etc. Some readers may be surprised to learn that half-truths and mud-slinging are nothing new - Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were both accused of being enemy spies, Grover Cleveland's illegitimate son was campaign fodder, and charges that the Pope would soon rule the USA came with candidacies of Catholics Al Smith (1928) and John F. Kennedy (1960).
I gave just four stars due to a couple factual errors (e.g., Martin Luther King was killed April 4, not April 27 1968), and readers may prefer the updated version - this one finishes with 1984. Still, this is fun, informative reading.
By William Hare (Seattle, Washington)
Paul F. Boller Jr. turned in a milestone effort with "Presidential Campaigns," combining an excellently developed historian's eye along with an objective presentation.
This informative work reads like an entertaining novel while providing all kinds of fascinating information about America's presidential campaigns from Washington to the present, from which we can learn so much about our nation's history, using famous elections as an evolutionary guide to understanding the peaks and valleys of the Ameican experience.
In that some of the subject matter is about heavy topics such as war and peace, domestic political conflict, and America during economic panics and depressions, Boller's humor is needed to lighten the heaviness and he delivers superbly. This is understandable since much of his career as an author involves books of anecdotes regarding American and British history as well as Hollywood's film world.
This is a book that crisply and entertainingly tells us so much about America, as revealed through its presidential compaigns.
By Matherson (New York)
This classic chronicle of Presidential campaigns, from the get-go to contemporary times, has the unusual virtue of being useful either as a collection of short readable chapters - each just the right size for a daily bus or train ride - or as a reference source. Reading this in the wake of Monicagate and the Florida Recount, it's instructive to read the history of Grover Cleveland, who seems to have features of BOTH past Democratic candidates. Like Clinton, he had his scandals - fathering an illegitimate child. Like Gore, his career was rudely interrupted by an election which he won on popular votes but lost, in a hotly contested, knife-edge electoral college tally.
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This is a well organized book full of useful facts that show how our political history has evolved over the years. Full of antdotes and trivia, the book reveals quite a bit about America. Very well condenced stories of each election. Reports things as historical facts rather than a political leaning (except for the 1988 race maybe). Overall a very good read.
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