Candidate Thomas Jefferson described opponent John Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
During the 1828 election, John Quincy Adams and his Federalist Party called Andrew Jackson’ wife: a “dirty…wench”, a “convicted adulteress” who was prone to “open and notorious lewdness.”
(For the record, she was a perfectly respectable woman. It’s been said that the accusations killed the unwell Mrs. Jackson.)
While campaigning for President, Stephen Douglas called Abraham Lincoln: a “horrid-looking wretch, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman,” and “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame.”
Lincoln returned the favor and described the diminutive Douglas as “about five feet nothing in height and about the same in diameter the other way.”
In the 1884 Blaine vs. Cleveland contest, news of Cleveland’s support of child he had fathered during his bachelorhood, led to opponents’ taunt of “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?”
During the 1804 election, detractors of Thomas Jefferson reprised the outrageous claim that Jefferson, "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves…Her name is Sally," and that Jefferson had "several children" by her.”
…Of course, the outrageous claim ultimately proved to be true.
It reminds us that there is more than “Spin” on the the campaign trail; An important lesson for the hypocritical SOBs of the (Insert Party Name Here.)
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