THE UNPRECEDENTED IS ALWAYS CUSTOM:

Our Founding Partisans: A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign by Edward J. Larson (Robert D. Novak, September 2008, The American Spectator)

Imagine that in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, President George W. Bush was directing the government to arrest, convict, and imprison his critics. Imagine that John Kerry was paying a scandalmonger to dig up dirt on Tom DeLay. Imagine further that John McCain was working secretly against Bush's re-election, that DeLay was plotting to replace Bush with Dick Cheney as president, and that John Edwards was conspiring to be elected president instead of Kerry.

Unimaginable, surely. But 204 years earlier in the presidential election of 1800, that's roughly what took place. The perpetrators were the statesmen who now are virtually deified as the Founding Fathers. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and just about everyone else on the political scene were performing in a dastardly manner that Bush, Kerry, Cheney et al. would never have contemplated two centuries later.

It is all laid out in A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign by historian Edward J. Larson, the acclaimed 2007 book now available in paperback (Free Press). The 1800 election is celebrated for establishing the precedent of the American presidency changing hands, from Federalists to what were then called Republicans, without bloodshed. But Larson's gripping account exposes what was not only a really close call, but also no model of governmental decorum and ethics.

Mr. Larson is, likewise, terrific in an earlier book at exposing how the Red/Blue divide occurred by the 1920's.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 7, 2008 1:26 PM