Jinxed: the state and the presidency
Pennsylvania, one of the largest, most populous states in the Union, had produced one president, and by all accounts, that one president was woeful.
He was James Buchanan. He was president in the lead-up to the Civil War. The knock against Buchanan, who hailed from Lancaster (where his home, Wheatland, is open for public tours), is that he refused to take strong measures to forestall the splintering of the country. He was followed in office by Abraham Lincoln.
One of Buchanan’s saving graces was that he treated president-elect Lincoln with professional courtesy and personal warmth in the prelude to the Lincoln inaugural of March 4, 1861. On that fateful day, the two men “emerged arm in arm” from the Willard Hotel, where the Lincolns were staying, and “took their seats in an open” carriage, according to historian Margaret Leech.
The Old Public Functionary, as Buchanan was known, was glad he was leaving Washington. The country was in shambles. Seven Southern states had already left the Union. Four more would follow. Ouch.
Is Joe Biden a Pennsylvanian? He was born in Scranton, left as a boy with his family for Delaware, and rose from that state to the Senate and eventually to his current prominence. Though he fondly remembers himself as the “third” senator from Pennsylvania, and returns, not infrequently, to Scranton to campaign, the president is not, for the purposes of this column, a Pennsylvanian.
Rick Santorum of Butler tried to be president. A former U.S. senator, Santorum won a total of 4 million Republican primary votes in 2012, second only to that year’s GOP general election candidate for president, Mitt Romney.
Paul A. Beers, in his book “Pennsylvania Politics,” lists seven presidential hopefuls from the state, most of whose names are now unrecognizable. There’s a chance that Pennsylvanians of a certain age recall Gov. Milton Shapp running for president.
With his hopes high, Shapp entered the 1976 Florida primary. He exited with 3% of the vote. He did just as poorly in Massachusetts. The primaries were Shapp’s political burial ground.
Another Pennsylvanian who lost a nomination for president but, unlike Shapp, survived politically was William Scranton. The governor of Pennsylvania in 1964, Scranton, a Republican, scrambled into the contest late in the game against the darling of party conservatives, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the eventual nominee who went on to lose to President Johnson in November.
That was 60 years ago. The party nomination process was very different then. There were some state primaries, but the bulk of convention delegates were handpicked by party leaders or at state conventions. National party conventions were still important. Now, not so much.
To illustrate just how much the political landscape has shifted since 1964, that year’s Republican convention was held in San Francisco, an unthinkable venue for today’s GOP.
The outlines of what the Republican would become were on display that summer at the city’s Cow Palace. The politically moderate Republican governor of New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller, was lustily booed by delegates and Goldwater supporters in the auditorium as he denounced conservative “extremism” from the speakers’ platform.
“The gallery seethed,” according to Theodore H. White in his book about the 1964 presidential campaign.
After former president Dwight Eisenhower called out the media in his convention speech, delegates and guests “exploded in applause, shouts, boos, [and] catcalls…. Sitting in the Goldwater galleries,” Teddy White “suddenly found two men peering over his shoulder, noting every word written in his notebook – and commenting angrily as they read.”
An NBC-TV reporter ordered by party officials to leave the convention floor was escorted out by police officers. “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody!” the future news anchor told viewers.
(Fair is fair. The same thing happened to future CBS anchor Dan Rather at the Democrat’s Chicago convention four years later.)
White wrote that the San Francisco convention marked the death of Republican “pragmatism.”
Why has Pennsylvania had only one president? Maybe this: A moderate state, Pennsylvania produces moderate politicians who fail to ignite a fire with voters.
Suffice it to say: If (or when) Gov. Josh Shapiro announces for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, he will confront some very long historical odds.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.