Al Flandon, Wendell Wilkie, Thomas Dewey, Adelaide Stevenson, Barry Goldwater

George McGovern

Walter

Walter Mondale

Bob Dole, John Kerry, Mitt Romney.

Those are all the people that have run

against a sitting president in the United States of America since

1932 and lost. FDR bodied three of them, the madman.

Electability is going to be a word you hear a lot over the next several months,

specifically as we go into a unusually busy and contentious Democratic primary.

For the first time in a little while, we seem to really have four candidates that could very plausibly take this

nomination. Specifically since electability is going to cross-pollinate with people's personal beliefs

on where both the Democratic Party and the country should be going. But what is electability? And why did none of the people

that I just mentioned have it? There was a lot of different experience in the names that I just

read. They all came from different places and some ran good campaigns, some ran

terrible campaigns, some ran terrible campaigns.

But in general what we know is this.

If you are running against a sitting president,

the odds are against you.

I didn't count

George H W Bush and the Bill Clinton election, mostly because I tend to think of George H.W. Bush 41 as really an outgrowth of Reagan.

Which of course brings us to the man that did it.

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