The Republicans were running the charismatic and likable political neophyte Wendell Willkie, a New York Republican corporate lawyer who ran an insurgent campaign assailing FDR’s failure to fully resurrect the country from the Depression and rumblings that the President would take the country back into another European war that far and away America wanted nothing to do with.

At the end of the day, Roosevelt was alarmed enough by Nazi fever being foisted upon the European continent that he decided to throw his hat into the ring.

He had to do a delicate dance to get himself on the ticket again, though. Breaking the two-term pledge was anathema to much of the electorate. At the convention in Chicago that summer, Convention Chairman Alben Barkley read a statement purportedly from FDR that the President had no desire to be re-nominated for another term as President of the United States and that “he wishes in all earnestness and sincerity to make it clear that all the delegates of this Convention are free to vote for any candidate.” As the puzzled delegates processed this seeming bow-out by Roosevelt, a voice boomed from the loudspeakers, “We want Roosevelt!”

Everyone looked around, but no one could tell where the voice was coming from. “We want Roosevent!”, the loudspeakers boomed again.

Suddenly, the delegates began to pick up the chant, yelling over and over, “Roosevelt! Roosevelt! Roosevelt!” The popular sentiment wasn’t going to be denied. Despite his selfless intention to step aside in the interests of not tearing the party asunder, the people were speaking. In the face of that rabid approbation, how could the party refuse Roosevelt the nomination, and how could Roosevelt refuse the will of the people?

Well, it wasn’t exactly the people. Unbeknownst to the delegates, the mystery voice that initiated the “We want Roosevelt!” chant belonged to Chicago’s Superintendent of Sewers Tom Garry. Garry was deep in the bowels of Chicago Stadium, manning a microphone, whipping the crowd into an uproar, and running back and forth between the convention floor and his catacomb work station, amplifying his mantra as necessary to stir the delegates into a sufficient frenzy and effect the “draft” nomination that the party bosses were after and that they knew that Roosevelt would accept.

The ruse was the brainchild of Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly, who had been a staunch FDR supporter and was, as were other party leaders, vexed by the President’s refusal to commit to a third term run.

The ploy was a rousing success, and Roosevelt won nomination with 946 votes. The delegates were less enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s Vice Presidential choice, Henry Agard Wallace, whom many considered an untethered loon and the doom of the country should, God forbid, something happen to the President.

JEREMIAH WRONG: Not to be let him be outdone by Hillary’s Gerry Ferraro meltdown, the gods of campaign parity smited the Obama campaign with their own racial Dresden this week, with Obama finally breaking ties with his spiritual adviser and the man who both married him and Michelle and baptised their daughter, Trinity Baptist Church preacher Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

“It just came to me within the last few weeks, y’all, why so many folks are hatin’ on Barack Obama. He doesn’t fit the model. He ain’t white, he ain’t rich, and he ain’t privileged. Hillary fits the mold. Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that! Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger!”

Now there’s a line you’re not going to see on an Obama bumpersticker.

That was over two months ago that Reverend Wright said that, but it’s been making the YouTube rounds in light of Gerry Ferraro’s affirmative action tirade this week. No one had started howling double standard yet and being the pragmatic strategist that he is, Obama went to the back of the train and cut this caboose loose.

You could practically hear the Obama team scramble to do damage control on this lest their margins start evaporating in Kansas and Missouri. About the only thing worse for the campaign would be putting Al Sharpton on the ticket.

Of course, don’t think that his early jettison of the Reverend is going to keep the Limbaughts running the 527s from firing that one directly at the hull of the Obama swift boat this fall.

If she makes it, she’s not going to be the toughest female ever to call the White House home. Never mind her own time sleeping in a separate bed next to her husband. Never mind Eleanor Roosevelt, formidable though she was. Never mind Lady Bird Johnson. Never mind the rough-edged pluck of Amy Carter. There’s never been a set of X chromosomes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue mightier than those of the most famous First Daughter, the progeny of Theodore Roosevelt, and the Roughest Rider in the Roosevelt brood, Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

Of all TR’s accomplishments, few were more consequential—or salitier—than his daughter, Alice. A notorious rake, 20th century history is resplendent with delightful quotes and anecdotes from and about Teddy’s challenging daughter who in a 1974 interview with Eric Sevareid proclaimed herself “a hedonist”–at the age of 90, no less–and “an ambulatory Washington monument”. It was Alice who claims ownership of the phrase “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anyone, come sit next to me.”, which she also had embroidered on a pillow on her sofa.

In a 1998 biography of former First Lady Florence Harding, Alice appears in the index more than 60 times. Some of the references include “spitefulness of” and “WH (Warren Harding) disparaged by”. Her recreational pursuits were legion, including target practice at telegraph poles from a moving train, betting on the horses (often being seen placing the bets with known bookies), smoking cigarettes on the White House roof (her crafty solution after she was explicitly forbidden by her parents from smoking under their roof), keeping a pet snake named “Emily Spinach”, and driving her own car around Washington DC at speeds many would consider imprudent. Never one to be outdone, when feather boas were all the rage in America, Alice took the fad one step further and donned a real boa constrictor around her neck.

When her father was succeeded in the White House by Secretary of War William Howard Taft, Alice–by now in her mid-20s–made no secret of her enmity of incoming First Lady Nellie Taft and buried a voodoo doll of her on the White House grounds and made great fun of mocking her “hippopotamus face”. Mrs. Taft would ban Alice from the White House (she was also banned during the next administration for a disparaging joke about President Woodrow Wilson). Alice was never shy about dispensing her often-scathing opinions very publicly, and her pejorative description of New York Governor Thomas Dewey as “the little man on the wedding cake” was said to have lost Dewey a not-insignificant number of votes in his two Presidential bids.

The gods didn’t exactly bring her into this world on the most blessed and inviting note: Just two days after she was born, her mother died from complications related to her pregnancy, and her grandmother also passed away, in the same house in which Alice was born. She was lavished with gifts as a child, but wanted for attention from her ambitious and often-absent father and, after Teddy remarried, would have a very strained relationship with her stepmother. When Teddy was Governor of New York and her parents proposed sending her to a girls school in New York City, Alice threatened, “If you send me I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will.” The girls school idea was dropped.

Alice loved her father, but certainly wanted for more attention from him, as he was constantly on the move on one avocational or vocational adventure after another. Alice inherited from Teddy his need for attention. “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpose at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.”

A pistol-wielding admirer once showed up at TR’s Sagamore Hill estate announcing that he was there to ask for Alice’s hand in marriage. Given the circumstances surrounding the man ‘s visit, and the fact that he was carrying a firearm, it was speculated that he might have mental health issues. “Of course he’s insane,” said Teddy. “He wants to marry Alice.”

After assuming the Presidency, an exasperated Teddy said to his visitor at one point, after another office interruption by Alice prompted TR to threaten to throw her out the window, “I can either run the country, or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”

Alice was her father’s daughter, and lived her life by a truly suitable-for-framing maxim:: “I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.”

The gold standard, and the bridge between catchy and the anodyne, focus-group-tested slogans of today was, of course, Dwight Eisenhower’s “I Like Ike”. It’s tight, alliterative, and fits nicely on a button or bumper sticker, and is perfect for a campaign jingle. It’s far too whimsical for a serious, 21st-century Presidential campaign, though. If he were running today, “I Like Ike” wouldn’t make it out of YouTube and a two-minute mention on Anderson Cooper 360.

But the further you travel back down the road of Presidential contests of days gone by, the slogans become both more inspired and pithy, and hackneyed and cornpone.

In 1840, William Henry Harrison and John Tyler hit an enduring home run with “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too”, which sang the praises of the hero of the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe, Governor Harrison, against Tecumseh and his men. In “Tyler, Too”, it acknowledged that…well, that he had a running mate.

Not to be outdone in the Tecumseh’s War sweepstakes, Martin Van Buren’s Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson, who had actively cultivated the legend that he himself had vanquished the famous chief, rolled out his own awkward slogan, “Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!”

With the Whigs circling the drain, the Democrats were feeling their oats in 1852 and their shot at their first victory since James K. Polk in 1844, and charged out of the gates with the muscular, vaguely-threatening, “We Polked You in ’44, We Shall Pierce You in ’52!”

In the 1936 match between Kansas Governor Alf Landon and incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democratic copywriters went for an economic and direct, “Remember Hoover!” for FDR and Garner’s re-election bid in 1936, and also came up with a dandy of an uppercut with “Sunflowers Die In November” (a reference to the upcoming election and the official state flower of GOP nominee Alf Landon’s Kansas).

The GOP sloganeers were pulling out all the stops for Landon, with mixed results. “Defeat the New Deal and its Reckless Spending”, “Let’s Make It A Landon-Slide”, and “Life, Liberty, and Landon” were tepid and forced at best, and “Let’s Get Another Deck” (in a play on FDR’s “The New Deal”) was only slightly more creative, and their most memorable being “Off the Rocks with Landon and Knox”.

Pity poor up-and-coming GOP star Styles Bridges, though. The New Hampshire governor was a party wunderkind during the 1936 Republican convention and much talked about for the Vice Presidential nomination. He may have had a good chance were it not for the Dems licking their chops and praying to their god for his selection, so they could unleash the brilliant, unforgettable, and surely devastating, “Landon-Bridges Falling Down”.

Therein lies an important factor in considering any campaign slogan: Gaming out how the opposition could turn your slogan back on you. Democrats in 1964 took nuke-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out GOP standard-bearer Barry Goldwater’s “In Your Hearts, You Know He’s Right” and turned it into “In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts”. If the McGovern campaign had had a little more of a ruthless streak to them, they could have cited America’s enduring Communist paranoia and used Richard Nixon’s overtures to Red China to turn his “Now More Than Ever” into “Mao More Than Ever”.

Some of the most memorable slogans of all time have in fact come from the opposition. In 1884, Democrat Grover Cleveland called his Republican opponent, “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine”, capitalizing on accusations that Blaine had profited improperly from legislation he promoted which benefited two railroads in which he held bonds. Some of Blaine’s notes on the issue surfaced with Blaine’s writing on them urging, “Burn this letter.”

When it was revealed during the election that Cleveland had possibly sired an illegitimate child while he was a lawyer in Buffalo, Blaine’s supporters unleashed their own sarcastic barb at Governor Cleveland: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” After Cleveland defeated Blaine in the general election, Cleveland’s supporters amended Blaine’s pejorative one-liner to read, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”

The Whigs in 1844 didn’t win many points for creativity, but they did have a valid question in their tagline, “Who Is James K. Polk?”. They were less effective with the awkward, “The Country’s Risin’ for Clay and Frelinghuysen”.

President William Howard Taft’s Vice President, James Schoolcraft Sherman, passed away just days before his ticket was trounced in the 1912 election. A shame, both in his death and in their resounding defeat, in that he could have run in 1916 on the cryptic but inspiring cheer that followed his 1912 re-nomination for the Vice Presidency, “Eins, zwei, drei, vier! Sherman is the winner here!” Admittedly, though, that may not have played so well in 1916 with the U.S. about to go to war with Germany.

Don’t expect any such sloganeering flourishes this year, no matter how much we like the Germans now.

The 1972 Presidential Race and possibly the course of history turned on March 7, 1972, when Democratic Presidential front-runner Ed Muskie held a press conference in front of the Manchester Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire where his emotions got the best of him and the press took his candidacy out behind the barn and shot it in the back of the head like a sick old dog.

Muskie was there that day to defend himself against a letter that had been published in the Union Leader on February 24 claiming that Muskie had made an insensitive allusion to our Canadian brothers and sisters to the north, and their Franco-American brethren in the United States. The letter’s writer–one “Paul Morrison of Deerfield Beach, Florida”–claimed to have asked Muskie and his staff how the Senator could understand the concerns of African-Americans when his own state was as white as a Pat Boone concert. According to the writer, a staffer got a chuckle out of Muskie when he said, “Not blacks, but we have Cannocks (sp).”

The Union Leader publisher, William Loeb, was no friend of the Muskie campaign, and may or may not have known that the letter was most likely a forgery. Loeb had once called the Senator, “Moscow Muskie” and had allegedly made unflattering remarks about Mrs. Muskie, “Paul Morrison” was never found, and it was discovered during the Watergate investigation that the letter was likely the product of the Creative Services division of CREEP–Nixon’s delightfully named “Committee to Re-Elect the President”. Polls taken the previous year showed Muskie beating Nixon by eight points in the 1972 election.

On a snowy Saturday morning in March the candidate gathered before the press to deny the incident described in the letter and to assail Loeb and the Union Leader for its hand in the affair. The moment quickly degenerated into an embarrassing spectacle for a man already suspected as being perhaps too temperamental to be the leader of the United States of America. Muskie railed against the newspaper and Loeb, calling the publisher “a gutless coward” for bringing Mrs. Muskie into the fray. His voice began to crack and newspapers and television reporters would later describe the Senator “weeping silently” and “tears streaming down his face”. Veteran political reporter David Broder wrote, “Muskie broke down three times in as many minutes–uttering a few words, and then standing silent…while he attempted to regain his composure sufficiently to speak.”

Muskie attempted to defend himself, saying that his voice was cracking from anger, and that the “tears” were actually snowflakes melting on his face. But the damage was done, and the man who had only four years before come within a few hundred thousand votes of becoming Vice President of the United States, and who was already favored to defeat Richard Nixon in the fall election, was finished as a contender for the Presidency.