The Better America of our Dreams

[RedDenver]

 

[Moiraine]

7 minutes ago, RedDenver said:

 

 

 

 

 

Good article here. She actually beat the guy who fired her in the Democratic primary (by 40 points), then won the general yesterday.

 

Quote

Hoffbauer went on the offensive during the campaign, hammering McGuffey for being fired in 2017 from the sheriff's department. Hoffbauer portrayed McGuffey as a dishonest bully.

McGuffey said she was fired for being a whistleblower exposing concerns about use of force in the department. 

 

 

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2020/11/03/cincinnati-election-results-mcguffey-hoffbauer-hamilton-county-sheriff/6045439002/

 

[RedDenver]

 

[RedDenver]

 

[TGHusker]

I thought this article would be most appropriate in this thread and for this particular time in history.

 

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-john-adams-got-over-political-defeat-11607093743

I wanted to post the last 2 paragraphs first as they  so uniquely portray a  "better America of our Dreams" and are so uniquely American.   Oh, to have statesmen like Adams and Jefferson again - who place nation before self, who, though they differed in policy, had the same heart to better the country and make the America of our Dreams. 

 

Quote

 

Adams and Jefferson died, with startling fidelity to the cause and to each other, on the same day: July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration on which they had labored together. That stirring coincidence amazed Americans, including a young reader in southern Indiana named Abraham Lincoln, who was beginning to bring into focus his own thoughts about the Declaration and its promise of human rights for all.

Even before their unforgettable joint exit, the two former rivals had done a great deal to deepen democracy. We often think of their earlier contributions—the first stirrings of independence and the presidencies that helped a young country to find its footing. Yet the friendship that Adams and Jefferson formed in their old age was just as meaningful and showed the world that Americans could lose gracefully and find comfort in their commitment to shared principles.

 

 

 

Quote

 

As Donald Trump continues to make clear his extreme unhappiness at the result of a presidential vote, it is worth considering another such instance from the past. Few presidents ever had more reason to sulk after an election than John Adams in 1800. But over time—many decades—Adams’s pique dissipated and turned into something constructive.

When his presidency began in 1797, Adams ruled the political universe—the heir presumptive to George Washington, even if he looked a bit less noble astride a stallion and had to deal with snickers about “his rotundity.” Four years later, he was defeated by Thomas Jefferson in a fraught election that exposed deep internal rifts among Americans, racial anxieties and more than a little skulduggery. Adams’s defenestration was all the more galling to him because he had gone to great lengths to move into the cold, drab, newly completed White House only weeks before the voters sent him packing.

Angry and sullen, Adams retreated from view. On the day that his successor was inaugurated, Adams left Washington at 4 a.m. and began a long journey back to his farm in Quincy, Mass. By the time Jefferson was sworn in, declaring his hopes that Americans would work together, Adams was eight hours away, moving as quickly from the Washington swamp as his team of horses could take him.

The two men weren’t always foes. “Mr. A and myself were cordial friends from the beginning of the revolution,” Jefferson remembered to James Madison. As the Declaration of Independence flowed from Jefferson’s pen, Adams was looking over his shoulder with edits. When the new republic needed friends on the world stage, the two friends dutifully went abroad. When George Washington became the first U.S. president, they once again served the cause.

The friendship began to fray as the earliest parties began to form, against Washington’s wishes. As the first vice president, Adams naturally defended the president’s policies, including Alexander Hamilton’s economic program and an unpopular peace treaty with England.

Yet an unruly populism was spreading quickly, and Jefferson was alert to these voices. With time, the followers of Adams and Jefferson began to act like parties and to call themselves, respectively, Federalists and Republicans, each claiming to be more legitimate heirs of the revolution than the other.

When Washington stepped down in 1796, Adams was duly elected his successor, over Jefferson. But after four years, the momentum had shifted to Jefferson, who had built up his network of supporters and made subtle adjustments to the electoral process that favored his chances. Meanwhile, the prickly Adams kept making enemies. He was furious at his critics in the media—some of whom he was beginning to arrest—and began to lose support among Federalists as well, especially as many drifted into the orbit of the charismatic Alexander Hamilton.

In November 1800, Adams moved into a White House so new that its paint was still drying. There were warning signs that his tenure would be brief. Adams became unexpectedly ill in the weeks before the election, and many feared that the new location was unhealthy. Abigail Adams called it a “quagmire,” adding that Georgetown, the nearest village, was “the very dirtyest hole I ever saw.”

Dirty politics was a problem as well, as was angry factional invective. Jefferson called the Adams administration “a reign of witches,” despite being vice president at the time. The Federalists retaliated by saying that Jefferson’s supporters were “Anarchists” and claimed that the election came down to a vote for “God—and a Religious President” or a vote for “Jefferson—and No God!”

Racial anxiety was palpable beneath the surface, too, with Southerners and Northerners already beginning to move apart. Tensions were high in Virginia, which had narrowly avoided a slave uprising in the summer of 1800. The Adams administration, on the other hand, had shown courtesy to the new Haitian republic, founded by ex-slaves, to the alarm of American slaveholders.

The election took some time to call, in an era when states didn’t count their electoral votes on the same day. Adams lost by eight electoral votes, 73-65, after a long and bitter tally that included a cynical effort by Jefferson’s running mate, Aaron Burr, to twist the results to his own advantage and snatch the top spot. Astute observers understood that Adams had been denied roughly 12 electoral votes—enough to flip the result—because of the votes given to the slave states through the notorious “three-fifths clause” of the Constitution. Glumly, Adams speculated that if the U.S. could look at itself in the mirror, it would be “disgusted with its own Countenance.”

He found his defeat hard to swallow. “My little bark has been overset in a Storm Squall of Thunder and Lightning and hail attended with a Strong Smell of Sulphur,” Adams wrote to his son. It didn’t take much imagination to trace that sulfuric odor to Jefferson, who serenely claimed to be above politics, although Adams also had strong reason to distrust Hamilton and Burr.

The republic’s first one-term president also found losing painful because no one knew exactly what an ex-president was supposed to do. The Constitution offered no instructions on how to fail. Disheartened as he was, Adams put his affairs in order and left a curt note for his successor, indicating that he was leaving behind seven horses, the property of the U.S. In failure, Adams pointedly showed the world that Americans would abide by the rules.

A long retirement followed. Adams led a quiet life, tending to his farm, while Jefferson’s presidency came and went. Twelve years after he left Washington, Adams finally snapped out of his funk and sent a letter to his old rival, offering Jefferson best wishes and “two pieces of homespun,” by which he meant two books by his son, John Quincy Adams.

Jefferson wrote back immediately, remembering the long years in which “we were fellow laborers in the same cause.” For the next 14 years, a fountain of prose gushed from these two master stylists, divided in politics but reunited in friendship. Much of it was personal—proud parents discussing their children and grandchildren, lamenting losses, complaining of small ailments as they aged. In his last letter, Jefferson used the Greek word “Argonaut” to describe their long journey together, and their correspondence retained a grandeur befitting two patriarchs who had weathered so much on behalf of the same cause.

 

 

[DevoHusker]

 

[ZRod]

16 minutes ago, DevoHusker said:

 

Why? This is like giving Obama the Nobel before he did anything.

[DevoHusker]

8 hours ago, ZRod said:

Why? This is like giving Obama the Nobel before he did anything.

Exactly what I thought. The reason I came up with...Not Trump.

[funhusker]

9 hours ago, DevoHusker said:

 

Meh...

 

Just did a quick look since 1980, and outside of '84 and '88, the President that won the election was "Person of the Year".

 

Does TIME even publish a magazine anymore, or do they just make digital covers?

[DevoHusker]

12 minutes ago, funhusker said:

Meh...

 

Just did a quick look since 1980, and outside of '84 and '88, the President that won the election was "Person of the Year".

 

Does TIME even publish a magazine anymore, or do they just make digital covers?

 

Interesting research. So, their "cover award" is basically a participation trophy. 

 

They do still publish a physical magazine.

[Redux]

TIME has no credibility concerning person of the year because it has to be a PC choice.  The most influential person is typically not someone who did something good, so the stunt double gets the "honor".

[funhusker]

29 minutes ago, DevoHusker said:

 

Interesting research. So, their "cover award" is basically a participation trophy. 

 

They do still publish a physical magazine.

I mean, winning a U.S. Presidential election is a pretty big accomplishment.

 

But I don't disagree that there are probably people more deserving...

 

I'm more interested in who is going to receive the "Teacher of the Week" award in my building today.  That at least comes with a 8.5x11 hand made certificate and a snack sized candy bar (2 bars if you say that you're glad you won because you needed a snack)!!!

[Redux]

27 minutes ago, funhusker said:

I mean, winning a U.S. Presidential election is a pretty big accomplishment.

 

Is it?

 

[DevoHusker]

28 minutes ago, funhusker said:

I mean, winning a U.S. Presidential election is a pretty big accomplishment.

 

But I don't disagree that there are probably people more deserving...

 

I'm more interested in who is going to receive the "Teacher of the Week" award in my building today.  That at least comes with a 8.5x11 hand made certificate and a snack sized candy bar (2 bars if you say that you're glad you won because you needed a snack)!!!

 

Well, from a HB point of view, there can only be one winner in your building (you got this!) 

 

Go for the 2 bar line!!

[Archy1221]

10 hours ago, ZRod said:

Why? This is like giving Obama the Nobel before he did anything.

Maybe the vaccine researchers as a group would have been a better choice for this year.