Arrive Magazine - September/October, 2008

Iowa voters use a unique method to test Howard Dean’s fitness for office.

SLEEPLESSNESS In this era of the 24-hour news cycle, it’s hard for candidates to get any sleep. But what else is new? Howard Dean blamed his 2004 Iowa Caucus histrionics on sleep deprivation. Sleeplessness got the better of Edmund Muskie in 1972. Drained of energy, he ended up in tears on TV, responding to newspaper allegations about his wife. To demonstrate his virility in 1996, Bob Dole went 72 hours without sleep in the final days of the campaign. (He awoke in December to find out he’d lost.) Too bad Viagra wouldn’t be approved for sale for another two years. Might have given him that extra edge.

and Florida’s Democratic delegates, you’d think this was the first time voters were threatened with disenfranchisement.

Not so.

In the 1890s, many Southern states, in an effort to disenfranchise black people and poor whites, amended their constitutions to include residency requirements, poll taxes and pop quizzes.

Thank goodness those days are over. A quiz? Voter turnout is low enough as it is. (The percentage of Americans who can find Iraq on a map has actually gone down since 1900. And Iraq didn’t even exist then!)

RABBLE-ROUSING
MINISTER

Ah, Reverend Wright. If lovin’ you is wrong, then ... we’ve been wrong for ages. Consider the election of 1884. The campaign’s low blow came six days before the election, when a minister, introducing Republican candidate James Blaine of Maine at a rally of clergymen, depicted the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.”

“That preacher cost Blaine the presidency,” says Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, author of A More Perfect Constitution. “He would’ve won that very close election had the phrase never been uttered.”

But, alas, it was uttered. And the nasty ethnic swipe at Grover Cleveland’s Irish Catholic supporters gave the Democrats the ammunition they needed to carry pivotal New York by 1,149 votes. In an eerily contemporary twist, the Democrats quickly organized a committee of volunteer lawyers to make sure that Cleveland’s victory survived the recount. (Of course, the 6,000 votes mi stakenly cast for Pat Buchana n tipped the election in Cleveland’s favor.)