Get Kamala Harris Into the White House With This One Weird 184-Year-Old Trick
Sep 10, 2024 5:00 am
By Robert Spencer
2 Comments
New in PJ Media:
Five weeks after officially becoming the Democrat party’s candidate for president, Kamala Harris still hasn’t held a press conference. In that span, she has only given one interview, a truncated, heavily scripted affair in which she leaned heavily upon her vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz. Only on Sunday did her campaign get around to posting some of her policy positions on her website.
Democrat power brokers are clearly hoping that they can keep doing this all the way to the Oval Office, and why not? It is an old and venerable American political trick that has worked more than once before: sell the candidate like soap flakes with a campaign that is long on excitement and short on specifics.
The first time this happened in a presidential campaign was 184 years ago. As “ Rating America’s Presidents” explains, in 1840, the country’s main opposition party at the time, the Whigs, ran William Henry Harrison for president and John Tyler for vice president — that’s right, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Many years before this, in 1811, Harrison was governor of the Indiana Territory when he defeated a native American confederacy led by the fearsome Tecumseh in the Battle of Tippecanoe. In 1840, the Whigs were determined to get Harrison into the White House not based on his public positions, but rather upon the appeal of the persona they fashioned for him.
Harrison had also run unsuccessfully in 1836. During that campaign, Nicholas Biddle, the former president of the Bank of the United States and a powerful Harrison backer, directed that the candidate should stay quiet about virtually everything: “Let him say nothing—promise nothing. Let no Committee, no Convention, no town meeting ever extract from him a single word about what he thinks now and will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.”
This advice went double for 1840. The Whig camp included those who favored the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, federal action to stimulate the economy, and a strong central government, but they also counted among their ranks opponents of all those positions, united only by their opposition of Democrat President Andrew Jackson and Jacksonianism, and hence also of Jackson’s prote´ge´, Martin Van Buren, whom Harrison opposed in both 1836 and 1840.
The Whigs’ lack of a clear message was compounded in 1840 by their choice of John Tyler, an anti-Bank states’ rights advocate who had been a Democrat until he fell out of favor with Jackson. There was nothing unifying this motley group, and so the Whigs had to find an approach for the 1840 campaign that wouldn’t expose their deep divisions on the issues.
There is more. Read the rest here. |
