#Edmund Muskie

[politicaldilfs]

Maine Governor DILFs

Paul LePage, Clinton Clauson, Edmund Muskie, Angus King, John Baldacci, John R. McKernan Jr., Robert Haskell, James B. Longley, John H. Reed, Joseph E. Brennan, Burton M. Cross, Kenneth M. Curtis

[wanderingmind867]

I don't know if this is readable (since i got it by screenshotting the comic) but this was one of the special things at the back of the masterwork: a magazine put together limericks for every candidate in 1976 election, and then endorsed Howard the Duck.

[halligan-elysium]

The 1972 failure...?

Okay guys here's how McGovern can still win

[oldshowbiz]

1972.

Paul Anka for Edmund Muskie.

[politicalrpf]

Ed Muskie leaving the ‘Edmund S. Muskie Archives,’ 1985.

[rjzimmerman]

This article tells me that either (a) the law clerks who worked for the US Supreme Court justices when they were developing their new case law about the Clean Air Act did a lousy job on researching Congressional intention or (b) the law clerks did their jobs but the justices (primarily Alito, Gorsuch, Roberts, Kavanaugh and Thomas) decided to ignore the clerk's work and memos. Most likely a combination of the two.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Among the many obstacles to enacting federal limits on climate pollution, none has been more daunting than the Supreme Court. That is where the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions met their demise and where the Biden administration’s attempts will no doubt land.

A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.

The research, expected to be published next week in the journal Ecology Law Quarterly, delves deep into congressional archives to uncover what it calls a “wide-ranging and largely forgotten conversation between leading scientists, high-level administrators at federal agencies, members of Congress” and senior staff under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. That conversation detailed what had become the widely accepted science showing that carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels was accumulating in the atmosphere and would eventually warm the global climate.

The findings could have important implications in light of a legal doctrine the Supreme Court established when it struck down the Obama administration’s power plant rules, said Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and the study’s lead author. That so-called “major questions” doctrine asserted that when courts hear challenges to regulations with broad economic and political implications, they ought to consider lawmakers’ original intent and the broader context in which legislation was passed.

“The Supreme Court has implied that there’s no way that the Clean Air Act could really have been intended to apply to carbon dioxide because Congress just didn’t really know about this issue at that time,” Oreskes said. “We think that our evidence shows that that is false.”

The work began in 2013 after Oreskes arrived at Harvard, she said, when a call from a colleague prompted the question of what Congress knew about climate science in the 1960s as it was developing Clean Air Act legislation. She had already co-authored the book Merchants of Doubt, about the efforts of industry-funded scientists to cast doubt about the risks of tobacco and global warming, and was familiar with the work of scientists studying climate change in the 1950s. “What I didn’t know,” she said, “was how much they had communicated that, particularly to Congress.”

Oreskes hired a researcher to start looking and what they both found surprised her. The evidence they uncovered includes articles cataloged by the staff of the act’s chief architect, proceedings of scientific conferences attended by members of Congress and correspondence with constituents and scientific advisers to Johnson and Nixon. The material included documents pertaining not only to environmental champions but also other prominent members of Congress.

“These were people really at the center of power,” Oreskes said.

When Sen. Edmund Muskie, a Maine Democrat, introduced the Clean Air Act of 1970, he warned his colleagues that unchecked air pollution would continue to “threaten irreversible atmospheric and climatic changes.” The new research shows that his staff had collected reports establishing the science behind his statement. He and other senators had attended a 1966 conference featuring discussion of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. At that conference, Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned about carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuel combustion, which he said “is believed to have drastic effects on climate.”

The paper also cites a 1969 letter to Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington from a constituent who had watched the poet Allen Ginsberg warning of melting polar ice caps and widespread global flooding on the Merv Griffin Show. The constituent was skeptical of the message, called Ginsberg “one of America’s premier kooks” and sought a correction of the record from the senator: “After all, quite a few million people watch this show, people of widely varying degrees of intelligence, and the possibility of this sort of charge—even from an Allen Ginsberg—being accepted even in part, is dangerous.”

Jackson then sent the letter to presidential science advisor Lee DuBridge, who responded by detailing the latest science, which showed that while there was uncertainty about the effects of increased levels of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas effect was real and a product of fossil fuel combustion.

“We just felt that strengthens the argument that this is not some little siloed scientific thing,” Oreskes said of the episode. “It’s not just a few geeky experts.”

[deadpresidents]

What do you mean when you said Carter faced a "historically weak group of challengers" in 76?

Quite simply, Jimmy Carter got lucky when it came to his opposition for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1976 because the biggest potential Democratic candidates chose not to run that year.

It's difficult now to understand how little-known Carter was when he decided to run for President in 1976. He had served a single term as Governor of Georgia and had almost zero national name recognition. So, he was very fortunate that the biggest names in the Democratic Party decided against running for various reasons. Chappaquiddick was still too fresh for Ted Kennedy to make his long-awaited bid for the White House that year. George McGovern had lost one of the biggest landslides in American history to Richard Nixon four years earlier. Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine and New York City Mayor John Lindsay were much bigger names than Carter, but also decided against running. Former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey considered jumping in the race for months, but ultimately decided against it, probably because he was dying of cancer. If any of those five Democrats had been in the race, they almost certainly would have been favored over Carter.

It's not fair to suggest that luck alone elected Carter. He ran an excellent campaign, and he was the first Democrat to jump in the race, so he gave himself plenty of time to introduce himself to the country -- which was necessary because, again, nobody outside of Georgia knew who he was! And his timing worked out perfectly because as the more-and-more potential heavyweight Democratic contenders decided against running, Carter was seen as an honest and appealing outsider who could bring a fresh approach to Washington.

But the field of candidates who did eventually seek the Democratic nomination in 1976 is so weak that a lot of people today probably don't even know who most of them were. I mean, one of the candidates who went into the 1976 Democratic National Convention was the notorious racist and Alabama Governor George C. Wallace! The best-known of Carter's 1976 Democratic opponents was Jerry Brown, who was in his first term as Governor of California and just 38 years old at the time, and he started to gain some real momentum in the campaign. However, Brown jumped in the race way too late and didn't have enough time to capture enough delegates before the Convention.

Other than Brown and Wallace, though, Carter's main opponents for the Democratic nomination in 1976 were Arizona Congressman Mo Udall, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, anti-abortion advocate Ellen McCormack, former Senator Fred R. Harris of Oklahoma, and Governor Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania. If I told you I made up six of those people, would you be shocked? But I didn't! That was the Democratic field in 1976!

[47burlm]

Portland Light Head Cape Elizabeth Maine

In Maine we have a saying that “there’s no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence”. – Edmund Muskie

[lboogie1906]

Ambassador Richard Lewis Baltimore III (December 31, 1947) was born in New York City to Judge Richard Lewis Baltimore, Jr. and Lois Madison-Baltimore. He received his BA in International Affairs from George Washington University and earned a JD from Harvard Law School. He entered the Foreign Service. He accepted a position with the State Department and was posted to the Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal, where he served as an Economic/Political Officer. He accepted a special assignment to Zambia during the civil war in Rhodesia.

He was posted to the Embassy in Pretoria. South Africa was under apartheid. He made great progress in improving relations with South Africa. He served as Special Assistant to three Secretaries of State (Cyrus Vance, Edmund Muskie, and Al Haig).

He served as a political officer at the Embassy in Cairo. His next assignment was in the office of the political chief at the Embassy in Budapest. He was appointed Deputy Director of the Regional Affairs Office of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. He became its Director. He returned to Budapest as Deputy Chief of Mission for the Embassy. He became senior policy adviser to the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs. Other positions include Deputy of Mission at the Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, and US Consul General in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

President George W. Bush appointed him to the position of Ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman. He worked to foster goodwill and cooperation. Oman was the first Middle Eastern country to host a US government-sponsored computer/ library reference center. He was posted at the Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he assisted in the attempt to restore democracy in the country. He returned to Oman to participate in one of the largest development projects in the Middle East known as Al Madina A’Zarqa, or Blue City.

He is a fluent speaker of French, Hungarian, Spanish, and Portuguese. He is married and has three daughters. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[unofficialbob]

yes actually... i had things to say about edmund muskie.

What did you say about him, if you don't mind me asking...

[douxlen]

The Little-Known Group That Pioneered Watergate’s Dirty Tricks—and Changed American Politics

New Post has been published on https://douxle.com/2024/08/10/the-little-known-group-that-pioneered-watergates-dirty-tricks-and-changed-american-politics/

The Little-Known Group That Pioneered Watergate’s Dirty Tricks—and Changed American Politics

Fifty years ago, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon told a national television audience that he would resign the following day. Nixon’s announcement, while historic, was not unexpected. Investigations into his role in the bungled Watergate break-in two years earlier had revealed a pattern of abuses of power—with shocking details of break-ins and dirty tricks captivating the nation during the televised Senate Watergate Committee hearings in the summer of 1973. 

Members of Nixon’s staff had confessed to an array of covert unethical (and sometimes illegal) tactics they had used to ensure the president’s reelection in 1972. A member of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), Donald Segretti, was open about his work of sabotaging the campaigns of Democratic candidates by disseminating false information. Testifying before the Watergate Committee on Oct. 3, 1973, he admitted that he had undertaken “political tricks” and espionage on behalf of Nixon’s campaign, including creating fake committees and printing propaganda, to foil the campaigns of Democratic candidates such as Senator Edmund Muskie. 

And Segretti was clear about when and where he had learned these tricks: as a college student at the University of Southern California, where he had been part of a political association known as Trojans for Representative Government—a group that ended up producing a bunch of Nixon staffers who participated in the Watergate scandal.

While presidential elections have been marred by mudslinging since the early Republic, these USC alums deployed a particular type of dirty tricks: what became known as “ratf–king,” or the use of unscrupulous tactics to interfere with the campaigns of opponents. The tactics pioneered by members of Trojans for Representative Government and later CREEP set a precedent for the sort of organized political sabotage that has become commonplace today in a digital world, especially for Republicans.

The story of Trojans for Representative Government is rooted in USC student politics. Beginning in 1931, a fraternity, Theta Nu Epsilon, dominated USC student politics for decades. In 1948, several students formed their own opposition party, Free Greeks, which later changed its name to Trojans for Representative Government. Their goal was to usurp Theta Nu Epsilon as the leading political organization on campus by positioning itself as a voice for all students. They tried to draw a contrast with their opponents, who they charged were solely interested in serving the interests of their fraternity members. The group quickly became the starting point for the careers of several California politicians, such as California State Assembly Speaker Jess Unruh, who graduated in 1948.

Read More: What Watergate Experts Think About the Jan. 6 Hearings

In the early 1960s, TRG became an anti-establishment party that used trickery to win elections. USC journalism professor Fred Coonradt stated in an interview that both Theta Nu Epsilon and Trojans for Representative Government historically engaged in illegal activities ranging from stuffing ballot boxes or dropping acid into them to ransacking campaign headquarters and bribing candidates to withdraw from elections. Future California Assembly Leader Walter Karabian, the student body president in 1959, recalled how Ronald Ziegler and Dwight Chapin—two future Nixon aides—falsely accused him of being a member of a secret society as part of a campaign to make him appear elitist. In 1960, Segretti, Chapin, and Ziegler, according to Coonradt, helped orchestrate a major student government election victory for TRG over Theta Nu Epsilon after several recent defeats.

In the end, for members of TRG like Chapin, the USC elections taught them how to excel at dirty campaign tactics — and how to get away with them with few consequences.

Chapin met Nixon during his third year at USC. A year later, H.R. Halderman recruited Chapin to work on Nixon’s 1962 unsuccessful California gubernatorial campaign, and Chapin brought Segretti, and Ziegler along. Chapin quickly rose to prominence within Nixon’s inner circle. Soon, dozens of former TRG members joined Nixon’s staff. In addition to hailing from the West Coast and sharing a sense of loyalty to Nixon, they found Nixon’s brand of anti-establishment conservatism appealing.

Nixon, in turn, handpicked several of them, including Ziegler, Chapin, Gordon Strachan, and Herbert Porter, to serve in prominent positions in his administration. He especially liked that they shared his humble West Coast roots and didn’t come from the inner circles of Ivy League universities or other elite east coast schools.

The ties between the Nixon Administration and TRG became public on Oct. 15, 1972, when Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, in their investigation of Segretti’s career, revealed that he was one of several members of Nixon’s staff who had been members of TRG during their time at USC between 1961 and 1963. The reporting duo identified Segretti, a former attorney with the Treasury Department, as a contact person for hiring operatives for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) — which, like TRG where he got his start, aimed to sabotage political opponents.

One of the most famous instances of CREEP resorting to these dirty tricks was their fabrication of the “Canuck letter” that ruined Muskie’s presidential campaign in the 1972 New Hampshire primary by falsely implying that he was biased against the state’s sizable population of voters of French-Canadian descent. 

In the weeks that followed Woodward and Bernstein’s initial article, several California newspapers covered the shady history of Trojans for Representative Government, and its connection to GOP elected officials. In a Los Angeles Times piece, reporter Bella Stumbo interviewed several USC faculty, including Coonradt, to explore the machinations of secret societies like Trojans for Representative Government and Theta Nu Epsilon, and to figure out why USC student politics were so raucous. Coonradt, who had advised USC’s student newspaper the Daily Trojan since 1948, told Stumbo that student government elections at USC had long mirrored the amoral tactics lately made infamous by the Nixon Administration. In his words: “Every year at USC is a Watergate.”

This reporting put Trojans for Representative Government in the national spotlight as Americans learned about how its dirty tricks had set the table for the Watergate scandal.

In the half century since Watergate, TRG disbanded, and its operations have fallen out of American political memory. Yet the group’s tactics lived on. Roger Ailes, the onetime Nixon strategist who founded Fox News, built upon these strategies with the concept of the orchestra-pit theory: shocking headlines will garner more attention—whether true or not—than balanced and reliable reporting. In the decades after Watergate, Republican strategists like Ailes continued to embrace these sorts of bruising tactics, though without breaking the law like CREEP did.

Read More: The True Story Behind Starz’s Watergate Series Gaslit

Most notable among them was Lee Atwater, who ran George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, which famously tied Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis to the ACLU, which Bush labelled a “subversive organization.” More famously, Atwater viciously scapegoated Dukakis for the actions of convicted murder William Horton, setting a damaging precedent for race-baiting in American politics. While a political group separate from the Bush campaign ran the famous “Weekend Passes” ad featuring Horton’s mugshot, Atwater capitalized on its success to skewer Dukakis on crime.

The practice of political sabotage received renewed attention during the 2016 campaign and the Trump Administration. Trump associate Roger Stone had once been a member of Nixon’s staff, although he refused to identify with the “USC mafia” of Segretti and Chapin, and he readily resurrected Nixonian tactics on behalf of Trump. In March 2024, the New Republic reported that State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland recommended that Trump’s former attorney, John Eastman, be disbarred for his unethical behavior in trying to overturn the 2020 election, asserting that Eastman’s misconduct exceeded Segretti’s own behavior during the Watergate scandal.

The term ratf–king itself has even made a comeback during the 2024 election cycle. Last year, an advisor to Trump told Rolling Stone magazine that they viewed primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as a “total ratf–k” against candidate Ron DeSantis, and were offering him secret support to tank the latter’s campaign against Trump.

The story of Trojans for Representative Government provided a historical grounding for the dirty election tactics we live with today. Although TRG proved short-lived, their Machiavellian philosophy of winning elections by any means necessary has become a hallmark of the Republican Party under Trump. That ethos is likely to shape the 2024 campaign.

Jonathan van Harmelen is a 20th century U.S. political historian. He writes about California political history and Asian American history, and his work has been featured in TIME, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is finishing a book on the role of Congress in the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

[sa7abnews]

The Little-Known Group That Pioneered Watergate’s Dirty Tricks—and Changed American Politics

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/09/the-little-known-group-that-pioneered-watergates-dirty-tricks-and-changed-american-politics/

The Little-Known Group That Pioneered Watergate’s Dirty Tricks—and Changed American Politics

Fifty years ago, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon told a national television audience that he would resign the following day. Nixon’s announcement, while historic, was not unexpected. Investigations into his role in the bungled Watergate break-in two years earlier had revealed a pattern of abuses of power—with shocking details of break-ins and dirty tricks captivating the nation during the televised Senate Watergate Committee hearings in the summer of 1973. 

Members of Nixon’s staff had confessed to an array of covert unethical (and sometimes illegal) tactics they had used to ensure the president’s reelection in 1972. A member of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), Donald Segretti, was open about his work of sabotaging the campaigns of Democratic candidates by disseminating false information. Testifying before the Watergate Committee on Oct. 3, 1973, he admitted that he had undertaken “political tricks” and espionage on behalf of Nixon’s campaign, including creating fake committees and printing propaganda, to foil the campaigns of Democratic candidates such as Senator Edmund Muskie. 

And Segretti was clear about when and where he had learned these tricks: as a college student at the University of Southern California, where he had been part of a political association known as Trojans for Representative Government—a group that ended up producing a bunch of Nixon staffers who participated in the Watergate scandal.

While presidential elections have been marred by mudslinging since the early Republic, these USC alums deployed a particular type of dirty tricks: what became known as “ratf–king,” or the use of unscrupulous tactics to interfere with the campaigns of opponents. The tactics pioneered by members of Trojans for Representative Government and later CREEP set a precedent for the sort of organized political sabotage that has become commonplace today in a digital world, especially for Republicans.

The story of Trojans for Representative Government is rooted in USC student politics. Beginning in 1931, a fraternity, Theta Nu Epsilon, dominated USC student politics for decades. In 1948, several students formed their own opposition party, Free Greeks, which later changed its name to Trojans for Representative Government. Their goal was to usurp Theta Nu Epsilon as the leading political organization on campus by positioning itself as a voice for all students. They tried to draw a contrast with their opponents, who they charged were solely interested in serving the interests of their fraternity members. The group quickly became the starting point for the careers of several California politicians, such as California State Assembly Speaker Jess Unruh, who graduated in 1948.

Read More: What Watergate Experts Think About the Jan. 6 Hearings

In the early 1960s, TRG became an anti-establishment party that used trickery to win elections. USC journalism professor Fred Coonradt stated in an interview that both Theta Nu Epsilon and Trojans for Representative Government historically engaged in illegal activities ranging from stuffing ballot boxes or dropping acid into them to ransacking campaign headquarters and bribing candidates to withdraw from elections. Future California Assembly Leader Walter Karabian, the student body president in 1959, recalled how Ronald Ziegler and Dwight Chapin—two future Nixon aides—falsely accused him of being a member of a secret society as part of a campaign to make him appear elitist. In 1960, Segretti, Chapin, and Ziegler, according to Coonradt, helped orchestrate a major student government election victory for TRG over Theta Nu Epsilon after several recent defeats.

In the end, for members of TRG like Chapin, the USC elections taught them how to excel at dirty campaign tactics — and how to get away with them with few consequences.

Chapin met Nixon during his third year at USC. A year later, H.R. Halderman recruited Chapin to work on Nixon’s 1962 unsuccessful California gubernatorial campaign, and Chapin brought Segretti, and Ziegler along. Chapin quickly rose to prominence within Nixon’s inner circle. Soon, dozens of former TRG members joined Nixon’s staff. In addition to hailing from the West Coast and sharing a sense of loyalty to Nixon, they found Nixon’s brand of anti-establishment conservatism appealing.

Nixon, in turn, handpicked several of them, including Ziegler, Chapin, Gordon Strachan, and Herbert Porter, to serve in prominent positions in his administration. He especially liked that they shared his humble West Coast roots and didn’t come from the inner circles of Ivy League universities or other elite east coast schools.

The ties between the Nixon Administration and TRG became public on Oct. 15, 1972, when Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, in their investigation of Segretti’s career, revealed that he was one of several members of Nixon’s staff who had been members of TRG during their time at USC between 1961 and 1963. The reporting duo identified Segretti, a former attorney with the Treasury Department, as a contact person for hiring operatives for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) — which, like TRG where he got his start, aimed to sabotage political opponents.

One of the most famous instances of CREEP resorting to these dirty tricks was their fabrication of the “Canuck letter” that ruined Muskie’s presidential campaign in the 1972 New Hampshire primary by falsely implying that he was biased against the state’s sizable population of voters of French-Canadian descent. 

In the weeks that followed Woodward and Bernstein’s initial article, several California newspapers covered the shady history of Trojans for Representative Government, and its connection to GOP elected officials. In a Los Angeles Times piece, reporter Bella Stumbo interviewed several USC faculty, including Coonradt, to explore the machinations of secret societies like Trojans for Representative Government and Theta Nu Epsilon, and to figure out why USC student politics were so raucous. Coonradt, who had advised USC’s student newspaper the Daily Trojan since 1948, told Stumbo that student government elections at USC had long mirrored the amoral tactics lately made infamous by the Nixon Administration. In his words: “Every year at USC is a Watergate.”

This reporting put Trojans for Representative Government in the national spotlight as Americans learned about how its dirty tricks had set the table for the Watergate scandal.

In the half century since Watergate, TRG disbanded, and its operations have fallen out of American political memory. Yet the group’s tactics lived on. Roger Ailes, the onetime Nixon strategist who founded Fox News, built upon these strategies with the concept of the orchestra-pit theory: shocking headlines will garner more attention—whether true or not—than balanced and reliable reporting. In the decades after Watergate, Republican strategists like Ailes continued to embrace these sorts of bruising tactics, though without breaking the law like CREEP did.

Read More: The True Story Behind Starz’s Watergate Series Gaslit

Most notable among them was Lee Atwater, who ran George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, which famously tied Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis to the ACLU, which Bush labelled a “subversive organization.” More famously, Atwater viciously scapegoated Dukakis for the actions of convicted murder William Horton, setting a damaging precedent for race-baiting in American politics. While a political group separate from the Bush campaign ran the famous “Weekend Passes” ad featuring Horton’s mugshot, Atwater capitalized on its success to skewer Dukakis on crime.

The practice of political sabotage received renewed attention during the 2016 campaign and the Trump Administration. Trump associate Roger Stone had once been a member of Nixon’s staff, although he refused to identify with the “USC mafia” of Segretti and Chapin, and he readily resurrected Nixonian tactics on behalf of Trump. In March 2024, the New Republic reported that State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland recommended that Trump’s former attorney, John Eastman, be disbarred for his unethical behavior in trying to overturn the 2020 election, asserting that Eastman’s misconduct exceeded Segretti’s own behavior during the Watergate scandal.

The term ratf–king itself has even made a comeback during the 2024 election cycle. Last year, an advisor to Trump told Rolling Stone magazine that they viewed primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as a “total ratf–k” against candidate Ron DeSantis, and were offering him secret support to tank the latter’s campaign against Trump.

The story of Trojans for Representative Government provided a historical grounding for the dirty election tactics we live with today. Although TRG proved short-lived, their Machiavellian philosophy of winning elections by any means necessary has become a hallmark of the Republican Party under Trump. That ethos is likely to shape the 2024 campaign.

Jonathan van Harmelen is a 20th century U.S. political historian. He writes about California political history and Asian American history, and his work has been featured in TIME, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is finishing a book on the role of Congress in the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 3.28

Beer Birthdays

Frederick Pabst (1836)

August Anheuser Busch, Jr. (1899)

Jaromír Vejvoda (1902)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Ken Howard; actor (1944)

Mike Newell; film director (1943)

Raphael; artist (1483)

Julia Stiles; actor (1981)

Vince Vaughn; actor (1970)

Famous Birthdays

Nelson Algren; writer (1901)

Freddie Bartholomew; actor (1924)

Fra Bartolommeo; artist (1475)

Dirk Bogarde; actor (1920)

Zbigniew Brzezinski; National Security Advisor (1928)

Eric Dixon; jazz saxophonist (1930)

Conchita Ferrell; actor (1943)

Nick Frost; actor (1972)

Lady Gaga; singer (1986)

Maxim Gorky; Russian writer (1868)

Cheryl "Salt" James; pop singer (1966)

Thad Jones; jazz trumpeter (1923)

Mario Vargas Llosa; Peruvian writer (1936)

Frank Lovejoy; actor (1912)

Charlie McCoy; harmonica player (1941)

Reba McEntire; country singer (1954)

Edmund Muskie; politician (1914)

Marlin Perkins; Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom host (1905)

Rudolf Serkin; pianist (1903)

Paul Whiteman; bandleader (1890)

Dianne Wiest; actor (1948)

[diamondisunmemeable]

I've been reading about Edmund Muskie as of late

Needless to say, I hate Nixon even more now

[wanderingmind867]

My US Voting Record:

I made this with the help of wikipedia, google and posts like voting guides which I found online.

Note: I would have been a Monarchist during the Revolutionary War, but I'd probably still vote if living in America (No matter how displeased the revolution made me, I'd probably still always be willing to vote). But to show my dissatisfaction, every vote until 1824 is a protest vote:

1788: Nobody (I refuse to vote for George Washington). Maybe a write in protest vote for King George III?

1792: Nobody (I refuse to vote for George Washington). Maybe a write in protest vote for King George III?

1796: Maybe a write in protest vote for King George III?

1800: Maybe a write in protest vote for King George III?

1804: Maybe a write in protest vote for King George III?

1808: Maybe a write in protest vote for King George III?

1812: Protest Vote for King George III (I can't vote for anyone after the War of 1812 got started)

1816: Protest Vote for King George III (again, I don't know if I'd be able to forgive anyone after the War of 1812)

1820: Protest Vote for King George IV (I can't support Monroe after he helped fight 1812 against Canada and the British).

1824: Henry Clay/Nathan Sanford

1824 Contingent: John Quincy Adams

1828: John Quincy Adams/Richard Rush

1832: Henry Clay/John Sergeant

1836: Daniel Webster/Francis Granger or William Henry Harrison/Francis Granger

1840: William Henry Harrison/John Tyler

1844: Henry Clay/Theodore Frelinghuysen

1848: Martin Van Buren/Charles F. Adams

1852: John P. Hale/George W. Julian

1856: John C. Frémont/William L. Dayton

1860: Abraham Lincoln/Hannibal Hamlin

1864: Abraham Lincoln/Andrew Johnson

1868: Ulysses S. Grant/Schuyler Colfax

1872: Horace Greeley/Benjamin Gratz Brown

1876: Samuel Tilden/Thomas A. Hendricks

1880: James A. Garfield/Chester A. Arthur

1884: Grover Cleveland/Thomas A. Hendricks

1888: Benjamin Harrison/Levi P. Morton

1892: James B. Weaver/James G. Field

1896: William Jennings Bryan/Thomas E. Watson

1900: William Jennings Bryan/Adlai Stevenson I

1904: Eugene V. Debs/Benjamin Hanford

1908: William Jennings Bryan/John Kern

1912: Eugene V. Debs/Emil Seidel

1916: Allan L. Benson/George R. Kirkpatrick

1920: Eugene V. Debs/Seymour Stedman

1924: Robert M. LaFollette/Burton K. Wheeler

1928: Al Smith/Joseph T. Robinson (although Herbert Hoover and Charles Curtis aren't bad either. I might've been a prohibitionist then, considering I hate the taste of alcohol. But Smith opposed lynching. So he gets my vote).

1932: Norman Thomas/James H. Maurer

1936: Norman Thomas/George A. Nelson

1940: Norman Thomas/Maynard Krueger

1944: Norman Thomas/Darlington Hoopes

1948: Henry A. Wallace/Glen H. Taylor

1952: Adlai Stevenson II/John Sparkman

1956: Adlai Stevenson II/Estes Kefauver

1960: Richard Nixon/Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (Solely because I hate JFK)

1964: Lyndon B. Johnson/Hubert Humphrey

1968: Hubert Humphrey/Edmund Muskie

1972: George McGovern/Sargent Shriver (although I still really like Thomas Eagleton as VP)

1976: Gerald Ford/Bob Dole

1980: Jimmy Carter/Walter Mondale

1984: Walter Mondale/Geraldine Ferraro

1988: Willa Kenoyer/Ron Ehrenreich (I hear Michael Dukakis went to high school with the guy who founded the Judge Rotenberg Centre, which is a terrible place. So I can't vote for Dukakis. Can't take a chance on him with that history).

1992: Ross Perot/James Stockdale

1996: Ross Perot/Pat Choate

2000: Ralph Nader/Winona Laduke

2004: Ralph Nader/Peter Camejo

2008: Ralph Nader/Matt Gonzalez

2012: Barack Obama/Joe Biden (Beginning in 2012, I'd probably start voting for Democrats more often because I felt I had no choice. But I'm still a bit unhappy with them. Haven't been since 1988 or 1992).

2016: Gloria La Riva/Eugene Puryear

2020: Joe Biden/Kamala Harris (My heart says Howie Hawkins/Angela Walker, however).

[tomsiebert]

Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine was forced to quit the 1972 presidential race because he shed a tear in a New Hampshire snowstorm. #WaybackWednesday