Despite the looming prospect that history will repeat itself and Americans Elect, the somewhat shadowy, hedge fund-financed entity with a yet-to-be-named candidate — a “mysterious millionaires’ machination,” as one left-wing skeptic recently put it — could potentially emerge as a viable alternative in the 2012 […]
Twenty-five years ago today Paul Laxalt, the former two-term senator and ex-governor of Nevada, formed an exploratory committee for a long-anticipated bid for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. One of President Ronald Reagan’s closest friends, Laxalt had served as national chairman of Reagan’s presidential campaigns […]
Declaring that the “hour of Socialist Revolution has struck,” the tiny Socialist Labor Party (SLP) — the original party of Marxism in the United States — nominated little-known John W. Aiken of Chelsea, Massachusetts, for president at the party’s national convention at the Cornish Arms Hotel […]
Calling President Richard M. Nixon “an international outlaw” on this day in 1972, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) candidate for president of the United States urged students at the University of Arizona in Tucson to join the antiwar movement. As part of a two-day […]
Declaring that Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a “national tragedy and a national disgrace,” Sen. John Glenn of Ohio announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on this day in 1983. Reagan’s presidency was wedded to an imaginary past resulting in “people sleeping on grates […]
Thirty-two years ago today, Harold E. Stassen announced that he had asked President Carter to send him to Iran to negotiate a release of the 52 American hostages being held captive after Islamic students and militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, […]
Country singer and songwriter Jimmie H. Davis, the son of a sharecropper who enlivened the campaign trail by performing with a quartet, won his second term as governor of Louisiana on this day in 1960. Best remembered as the composer of the hit song “You Are […]
Wilbur D. Mills, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who long opposed congressional attempts to end the war in Indochina, surprised his colleagues forty years ago today by calling for an immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam. […]
Thirty-two years ago today, Rep. Phil Crane of Illinois, a leading conservative firebrand in the U.S. House of Representatives, abandoned his twenty-month quest for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed conservative rival Ronald Reagan. Crane, who had not actively campaigned since losing badly in his […]
At the height of the Great Depression, New York City experienced one of the most fascinating mayoral elections in American history, a campaign dominated by two distinct new party movements. The 1933 mayoral race pitted Fiorello H. La Guardia, a fiery former progressive Republican congressman […]
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