I wasn’t born yet but I seem to have an embedded memory of an election that also took place amid an unpopular war.
The GOP nominated this man. A famous war hero. Notably bipartisan, he won the nomination after besting the right wing of his party.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
His vice-presidential nominee was someone from the west, much younger, someone Ike hardly knew, someone known as a hard-charging partisan who specialized in slashing attacks:
Richard M. Nixon
Over on the Democratic side, the party found an inspiring yet cool and cerebral intellectual from Illinois:
Adlai Stevenson
He was joined on the ticket by a U.S. Senate insider of long tenure:
John Sparkman
Familiar?
One big difference. In ‘52, the incumbent was a Democrat, Harry S Truman. Eisenhower’s victory was predicated on the need to change parties and clean house. He had to run an above-partisanship campaign because then, as now, the Republican “brand” was damaged by the previous Republican president, in this case Herbert Hoover, to whose disgraced memory Democrats tied Republican presidential candidates for decades.
That difference might be enough to put the 2008 version of the Illinois “egghead” over the top this time. Stevenson was stuck with the baggage of Truman’s failed presidency (or so it was perceived at the time), but Eisenhower managed to escape the Hoover curse, the only Republican to do so from 1932-1968. John McCain is carrying the burden of Bush’s failures, while Barack Obama can point to the good-time era of his Democratic predecessor’s reign.
