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Friday, June 9, 2006
Puzzle: "Outsiders" Elected U.S. Presidents
After listening to the
Instapundit
podcast with Michael Barone which discussed, among other things, whether a third-party candidacy for the U.S. presidency was viable in the current era, and reading
Peggy Noonan's column on the same topic a couple of weeks later, it seems to me, even as an outside observer, that there is a growing sense in the U.S. not only that things are running off the rails, but that the political system, which increasingly seems to have become polarised into a Party of Corruption and a Party of Moonbats, is unlikely to offer up candidates capable of doing anything sensible about the situation before the impending train wreck.
This causes people to think about the possibility of an insurgency led by an outsider, in the mold (but less nutty, and without the funny ears) of Ross Perot's candidacy in 1992. But the lesson of history to date has been that Americans don't elect outsiders as Presidents, which leads to today's puzzle, which I will pose in three stages of increasing difficulty, only revealing the next after you display the answer to the last. If I wrote out all the questions at once, some of the later ones would give away or provide hints to previous questions. We'll start with a really easy one.
Who was the last U.S. president with no prior experience in elective office?
Come on—you shouldn't have to wrack your brain too hard for this one!
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Answer)
Dwight D. Eisenhower, a general and, briefly, president of Columbia University before winning the presidency in 1952.
I said this one was easy. Now let's make it somewhat more difficult.
Who was the last U.S. president with no prior experience in elective office nor military background?
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Answer)
Herbert Hoover, who served as Secretary of Commerce in the Harding and Coolidge administrations and in various capacities in humanitarian projects during and after World War I, but never ran for an elective office before winning the Presidency in 1928. A Quaker, he never served in the military.
Now for the toughie:
Who was the last U.S. president with neither experience in federal office (elective or appointed), nor as governor of a state, nor senior military command prior to becoming president?
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Answer)
Abraham Lincoln, whose only experience in elective office was eight years in the Illinois legislature. He served as an officer in the Black Hawk War but never rose above the rank of captain. In 1858, he ran for the U.S. Senate, but lost the election to Stephen Douglas.
In fact, Lincoln is the
only president who meets this criterion.
Chester Arthur comes close: his military experience was as Quartermaster General of the State of New York during the war between the states, and afterward he ran the Customs House of the port of New York (which, I suppose,
does qualify as an appointed federal office, but hardly a senior one). But in any case, he won election in 1880 as
James Garfield's vice president and assumed the presidency when Garfield was assassinated in 1881.
Interestingly, however, in the more than two centuries from G. W. through G. W. Bush, there has
never been a U.S. president who did not have either experience in government (elected or appointed) or in the military, and only one president who had never previously held federal office or a senior military command. This does not bode well for dreams of reform candidacies led by entrepreneurs, talk show hosts, or Hollywood celebrities.
Posted at June 9, 2006 20:56