Andrew Jackson: The Dangerous Candidate | The 19th Century
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 August 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump cut from the same cloth?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of campaign curiosities. I'm John Ickerson. |
| 0:15.6 | If there's a constant in the American campaign story, it's that the elites can't predict the future very well. |
| 0:21.9 | News is what surprises us, which is why political press always has news. |
| 0:26.7 | When voters are always undoing our certainties, we've been certain that Truman was a gone goose in 1948, |
| 0:32.8 | but a B-List movie actor with relatively simple views, we'd never get elected. And Donald Trump, there's |
| 0:38.4 | no way he was going to win the Republican primary in 2016. In 1824, insiders were certain, |
| 0:45.1 | they were certain that Andrew Johnson was not his name. That wasn't the candidate's name. |
| 0:49.6 | They were certain of that. But what they were less certain about is whether Andrew Jackson |
| 0:53.1 | was a serious contender for the presidency. |
| 0:56.0 | He had a really thin political resume, and while he was a military hero, with bullets still in his body, |
| 1:02.0 | and a roadmap of scars, the general was also a hothead. He was a frontier wild man, too ill-tempered for the job. |
| 1:10.0 | Even he agreed, I can command a body of |
| 1:13.0 | men in a rough way, he reportedly said in 1821, but I am not fit to be president. So in 1824, |
| 1:20.4 | Jackson couldn't possibly have been a serious contender for the presidency. Plus, he was competing |
| 1:25.7 | with a tough field. The campaign of 1824 was packed |
| 1:28.6 | with veteran legislators and cabinet officials, secretaries of state, and war and treasury, the farm team, |
| 1:34.6 | from which all presidents since Washington had been chosen. Of course, there were a lot of presidents |
| 1:39.6 | since Washington, but anyway, that was the way things had been going. There have been nine elections, |
| 1:44.9 | and that was a pattern about how far from the guy. Jackson was such a long shot. Man in the |
| 1:50.0 | node figured that he was actually just a stalking horse for the federalists, which had died. |
| 1:55.5 | The artful federalists sit on paper, knowing the general's popularity and as a patriotic warrior, |
| 2:02.5 | have started his name for the presidency, the purpose of sowing dissensions in the Democratic Party. So he wasn't running for real. |
... |
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