Joe Biden's basement campaign echoes Warren Harding's front porch presidential run - Th... - 0 views
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n 1920, Harding ran the last “front porch” campaign by a U.S. presidential candidate from his home at 380 Mount Vernon Ave. in Marion, just north of Columbus.
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A century later, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is challenging President Trump from the basement of his Delaware home, where he has been sheltering in place during the coronavirus pandemic
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Both men are itching to get out on the campaign trail with rallies and speeches. Harding’s goal was exactly the opposite: “to restore the dignity of the office” of president by avoiding the “barnstorming, water tank speech and [railroad-car] tail end platform business.”
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Presidential candidates not only sat home but didn’t even campaign before 1840, when Ohio’s William Henry “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison became the first to give speeches with a campaign of carnival-like rallies. In 1880, Republican James Garfield campaigned from his farm in Mentor, Ohio. In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, William Henry’s grandson, ran from his house in Indianapolis.
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Harding’s campaign theme was “a return to normalcy” after the turmoil of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic.Instead of going to the people, he had the people come to the large, curving front porch of his wood-frame house in Marion, a town of about 30,000 residents.
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Meantime, Harding’s Democratic rival, Ohio Gov. James Cox, was campaigning by train in 36 of the 48 states.
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Cox said he was “carrying his front porch” to the country, while his opponent continued “his self-isolation in a small Ohio community,”
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By October, Harding was far in the lead. His front-porch campaign had drawn more than 600,000 people.
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Harding didn’t make it to the end of his first term. In the summer of 1923, after a bout of flu, the president took a cross-country train trip. On Aug. 2 in San Francisco, he died after a heart attack.
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Harding’s legacy was tarnished by scandal following his death. In 1927, it was ruled that his interior secretary secretly sold drilling rights to federal oil wells in Teapot Dome, Wyo., to private oil interests.
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In 1927, young Nan Britton published a book claiming she was Harding’s mistress and gave birth to his daughter. Decades later, love letters were uncovered showing, in a Stormy Daniels-like moment, the Republican Party in 1920 had paid another Harding high-society mistress to take a long voyage until the election was over.