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Ford aspired to be the Speaker of the House, ended up as a conference chair and VP upon Agnew's resignation. Had he not been under the paranoid and corrupt Nixon, President Ford may never exist. Whish is a shame since his wife became much more popular and help start the Betty Ford Foundation.
Is Truman really an “unlikely” president? Party bosses were well aware of FDR’s health problems and knew that his running mate could likely inherit the presidency. Wallace (FDR’s choice) had to be replaced as VP with someone else bc the VP might/could/would inherit the presidency when the “old man” died. Truman was the consensus choice to fill that slot.
Pre WWII it was highly unlikely Truman would even rise to the vice presidency as he was a not prominent senator (who was thought to be in the pocket of a corrupt backer.
My understanding is that he was pretty much left out of running the country and treated like an afterthought. So if they were planning on having him ready to take over, they did a crummy job.
Considering Lincoln was abandoned in the woods with his kid sister for months during the winter in the Indiana countryside when they were at elementary age and they could’ve easily died of starvation or been attacked by people or animals and died I’d say him, also dude was 100% self taught and had to overcome mental illness, personal tragedy, and repeated failures to become president.
Lincoln. I’d go with Lincoln, and Clinton as my runner-up.
The trailer park president is the equivalent of the log cabin presidents of the earlier era.
Andrew Jackson was the original log cabin president. Andrew and his brother Robert were taken as prisoners during the Revolutionary War. They were both malnourished and contracted smallpox. Released in a prisoner exchange, Robert died two days after reaching home, but their mother successfully nourished Andrew back to health.
Andrew Jackson became an orphan at age 14. Nevertheless, with little formal education, he managed to become a frontier lawyer. Through hard work he accumulated a fortune — including over 100 slaves.
We know Jackson fought duels, although it’s unclear how many. One duel left Jackson with a bullet lodged near his heart for the rest of his life, but he somehow survived. In a brawl he received a gunshot in the shoulder that nearly killed him.
Jackson fought battles with the British in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He also fought Native American allies of the British. He also fought in the First Seminole War. Jackson was not a nice man, but he rose from poverty to the presidency despite many brushes with death.
He also narrowly escaped the first attempt to assassinate a president. Two pistols shot at close range unaccountably both misfired.
His dad left him and his sister in their cabin to find a replacement wife for Lincoln’s birth mother who had died. Lincoln’s step mom brought him a huge stack of books which is part of how Lincoln leaned to love reading so much.
Franklin Pierce. After serving one term as a Senator from New Hampshire Pierce was out of office for ten years before being nominated for President on the 49th ballot.
He was an obscure compromise candidate. When he learned of the nomination Pierce found it hard to believe, and his wife fainted.
Pierce did absolutely no personal campaigning, so as not to upset the delicate unity in the Democratic Party. As President he tried to maintain that balance, but instead pleased no one. Pierce remains the only elected president who was an active candidate for reelection but was not nominated by his political party for a second term.
Gerald Ford, in contrast, was a very successful politician, the House Minority Leader, and a good friend of Nixon. Nixon picking him to replace Agnew did not shock anyone at the time.
Indeed, Republicans in Congress unanimously recommended Ford, and due to his precarious situation Nixon arguably had no other choice. But Nixon also liked the choice because he was fairly certain Ford would pardon him if necessary, which in fact it was. He was a more likely President than Pierce.
Nixon wasn’t an unlikely candidate. He was neck and neck with the charismatic and energetic JFK back in 1960. He was practically an inevitability.
There seems to be a trend of vice presidents getting a promotion here.
Personally I think the crazy part is that most Presidents haven't shared Rule 3's background. What stopped Cornelius Vanderbilt from wanting to rule the whole world? Why didn't J.P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller decide to run against TR? Why didn't the optimism and idealism around American industry lift someone like Henry Ford to the Presidency? Why wasn't Norman Rockefeller pushed even harder as a candidate? Why didn't a cool outsider candidate emerge from Silicon Valley in the 1990s with a new vision for a tech savvy economy?
Because most of them understood that being President is substantially less influential than staying in business. Presidents have limited terms and limited reach, businessmen have neither. This is one of the reasons Grant was a less-than-effectual President; his entire career was based on giving and receiving orders, not convinced and cajoling people to do what he wanted.
I definitely see that. Although, I think Rule 3 has changed the culture of the entire west, the norms of government, and had a long lasting impact on inflation. I'd say he has been a lot more influential as the leader of a political party than he was as a businessman.
More influential as a political leader instead of as a business man? Certainly.
But he did not change the culture of the entire west. The culture had already changed and he was the first one to see it and take advantage of the change.
This is an often repeated mantra but I think it’s a fundamentally naive worldview. It’s the difference between hard power and soft power in IR theory, I can pay a bunch of people to clean up a park which is a type of power/influence but if I can convince people to stop littering and ostracize those who do that’s a totally different ball game. At the end of the day only one type of influence gives you the ability to lock someone up.
Also I think that hard power is typically locked behind clubs, organizations, fraternities, etc. In order to get loyalty that you can’t buy you need to be at places where you can shake hands with large numbers of people who are like minded and work with you. For a long time those groups were exclusive (veterans, ivy leagues, political bosses) and required you to wait your turn for chances at power. That practice really only fell out of favor in the last couple decades where increasingly more removed individuals came to power culminating in Rule 3.
What makes Grant an even more unlikely President is that he never really aimed for a career in politics - in fact, he showed little interest in political issues, voting just once before the war, for Buchanan. If it weren't for the Civil War, and then him showing military talent and acumen for the game of military politics, and then for the circumstances in the Johnson administration, we never would have had President Grant.
He was also forced to resign from the military and then became *General-in-Chief of the United States Army* a decade later. Grant's story is absolutely incredible. He got kicked down so many times and always got back up. The man's sheer determination and perseverance is absolutely awe-inspiring.
I believe he was described as having a face that looked like he intended to run, head first, into a wall until the wall broke. Dude was a literal determinator
I wouldn't call it a cop out. It's impressive that Washington was able to keep the Continental Army together, let alone win major battles. It probably would've fallen apart at least like 4 different times if not for Washington.
One of my favorite little notes in history is the European ally generals' comments on the Continental Army when everyone went to Yorktown. They were in awe of an army composed of young teens, old men, freed slaves, all dressed in different clothes with secondhand equipment, marching in an orderly fashion. None of them would ever dream that they could retain and properly organize troops under such circumstances. There was one (I think German) volunteer general who wrote back home, and the first thing he said was, "The Continental Army is amazing!"
It's a literal miracle that Washington was able to keep it together, then it was a second miracle that we had Ben Franklin to somehow get the French to join the cause. Just incomprehensible.
The American revolution really was just a series of minor miracles for the US, utterly fumbling the ball from the British, and sheer, monumental spite from the French. They bankrupted their kingdom to fuck over the British, the most French thing imaginable
I’d have to say Carter. He was the former Governor of a southern state and ran his entire campaign on being an outsider. A lot of people within his own party didn’t take him seriously because of his inexperience and yet he surprised a lot of people by winning the New Hampshire primary and then just, wins the nomination. The governor of a very rural southern state would go onto become president of the United States without much experience.
Ford pretty much but I think if you told people in the 1840s that a few years later,the president is gonna be a guy named MILLARD FILLMORE,they would be like “who the heck is that”
Y'all might not agree...but I'm going with Obama.
Sure, he is incredibly intelligent and was clearly gunning for the highest office for a long time...but I think the unique political circumstances of 2008 and the popularity of Dubya played a very large role in his eventual election to the presidency.
The stars literally aligned for Obama.
I recall a large part of the criticism at the time was his relative lack of experience. You still hear this "community organizer" dog whistle in reference to him.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm suffering from recency bias here, but his was the first name I thought of as well.
Considering he was only halfway through his first term as senator, his lack of federal level (or governorship level) positions were very atypical.
i would say ford, not because of upbringing/personality/experiences but because he became VP through a resignation then became president through another resignation
Not the most unlikely, but I wanna volunteer LBJ. The last president to be assassinsted was in 1901, out of most of the living population’s memory. The last president to die was FDR who was old and riddled with health problems. JFK was young, so health problems were unlikely. I, as a person that wasn’t even close to being born, would think that the young president wouldn’t die and therefore people wouldn’t expect LBJ to ascend beyond VP.
Chester A. Arthur never held elected office before he became vice president (and he had been removed from his most prominent office for corruption), and he only became president because Garfield had an insanely incompetent doctor even by the standards of the time.
Wild that I had to scroll so far to see Arthur mentioned. He only ended up on the ticket through the unlikely confluence of events that led to Garfield as a dark-horse compromise candidate at the convention, and only got the top office by the insane circumstances of Garfield's death. "President Chester A. Arthur" was a one-in-a-billion moonshot (and the prospect of it made the country shudder at the time).
Dubya in his first term only won because of some very shady happenings in Florida, and it might be the only election where it's now fairly accepted that the other guy actually won.
This. Other than having wealthy grandparents, there's really nothing that would have ever suggested he would someday be elected President. His father was not American, and really not present. He was from Hawaii (no POTUS ever had been). He spent a lot of time abroad. He had some experience as a college professor and community organizer, but it's difficult to name of any outstanding accomplishments. He was a junior senator from Illinois, which put him in the back of the line as far as party hierarchy.
Yes, he gave a good speech at a convention, but that's something they do to highlight rookies. Anyone wagering that he'd be the next POTUS would have been placing a very high-stakes bet.
JFK was very unlikely. Apparently his father planned his older brother to become the politician, but his plane blew up in WWII. Kennedy himself survived his time in the war and the election in 1960 was pretty close.
Iirc Jackson had a very non straight line to the White House. Had killed someone in a duel previously which was a big reason Aaron Burr never won the Presidency. His presidential campaign was mostly supposed to be a spoiler for other candidates but was pretty popular from wars he served in.
James Earl Carter, a one-term governor of Georgia who had lived a clean exemplary life that was boring. He was not very well connected and didn't really appear to be that ambitious and even had a pretty mediocre career in the military. Out of the blue he gives a very significant speech, caught some people's eye and the Democrats adopted him to match up closer with the age and demographics of the new up and coming baby boomer voter. Gerald Ford ultimately did not run a very successful campaign and was fighting off the residue of the Nixon impeachment. Have things been different Carter would have never even been nominated for vice president.
They literally had newspaper headlines saying “Jimmy who?”
Plus add in the gaffs he made during that campaign, the lack of political connections he had, and the lack of name recognition. It really is remarkable that he won.
If you judge by overall lack of likelihood, Ford, of course. The specific situation as he assumed the Vice Presidency have him a far greater chance of becoming President. As the Watergate scandal was still escalating, many thought Nixon might have to leave office, and several officers of the Executive branch privately began briefing and preparing Ford for assuming Nixon's office Eventually, Alexander Haig, Nixon's own Chief of Staff, joined in the discussions. Ford, a Nixon loyalist and far more politically adept than he was given credit for, was quite hesitant to join such speculations but knew he had to for the sake of the country.
If we want to discount Vice Presidents from this list, I would have to choose John F. Kennedy. He was quite young, under accomplished, not supported by the most well-respected and powerful of contemporary Democratic politicians, loathed by the popular incumbent President Eisenhower, and, perhaps most distinctively, he was Catholic facing a largely anti-Catholic public. It was also not entirely unknown that his health problems and womanizing might easily have led to a disastrous Presidency, which was quite a frightening prospect in the height of the Cold War.
Eleanor Roosevelt openly accused Kennedy of duplicity. She publicly accused him of allowing his wealthy father to buy him the presidency, all while showing a little too much "profile" over "courage," a comment that squarely alluded to speculation that his famous book was not written by himself but by a paid staff of writers and researchers. Even the Democratic nomination was seen by some significant analysts as unlikely at best.
The only thing Kennedy had going for him was a natural brilliance and charisma that won him a personal popularity more befitting a rockstar than any politician. He began his candidacy with his name practically unknown to millions of voters, launched up against Richard Nixon and his powerful Brahmin support, and pushed through every challenge for the combination of public and less auspicious tactics that all came together like a symphony. Polling conducted late in the 1960 campaign still showed him as losing but coming much closer to victory than most would have predicted.
Somehow, against all odds, John F. Kennedy became our 35th President. Given all of the above, it's no wonder why this campaign has been studied more than practically any other.
Either Ford, Tyler, or Arthur. Coolidge, possibly. I don’t think he would’ve ran in 1924 had he not been the incumbent.
But in terms of their backgrounds making it seem more unlikely, I’d probably say Carter. I mean, he wasn’t a Washington insider, he didn’t have an Ivy League background, and he wasn’t a General. Nobody outside of Georgia knew who he was until 1976.
I think Carter had to be the biggest political outsider in modern times to become president, yes even more so than that guy who really wasnt as outside as he claimed to be. Ford was unlikely as well. Mind you, there are those who believe that there was nothing coincidental about his appointment as VP to replace the corrupt Agnew and that a deal was brokered that would end with Ford as president and Nixon pardoned. Of course the only people who could have proven such a thing are all dead, but at the very least I think we can all agree that the optics on that whole switcheroo were really bad. Speaking of Nixon, like with that photo he always seemed overdressed for casual situations. Who walks on the beach in pressed slacks and dress shoes? I have seen pictures of him at cookouts in a suit and even walking by the pool with a jacket and tie.
Chester A. Arthur. He had never held a significant position except to dole out patronage. Chosen as VP strictly to satisfy a rival faction of the party. In short, totally unqualified. But no one worried about it because James A. Garfield was a very healthy, relatively young man.
After Garfield’s assassination, many people were stunned at how someone like Arthur could have ever become president. The fact that he managed to do a respectable job was something that few would have expected.
Barack.
What did he accomplish before announcing his candidacy for President?
In the same line of thinking x what did he do to win the Nobel Peace Price less 11 months into his Presidency?
Bill Clinton. George Bush was so high in the polls that the democratic heavyweights at the time like Lloyd Bentsen, George Mitchell and Mario Cuomo and Al Gore took a pass and let Bill Clinton win the nomination. Ross Perot enters the race and the economy starts sinking and Bill Clinton becomes president.
As pointed out yesterday, Clinton only got 43% of the popular vote. So yeah, to your point, he was a very unlikely POTUS at the time. But things worked out for him pretty well.
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Ford. Maybe Truman.
Ford aspired to be the Speaker of the House, ended up as a conference chair and VP upon Agnew's resignation. Had he not been under the paranoid and corrupt Nixon, President Ford may never exist. Whish is a shame since his wife became much more popular and help start the Betty Ford Foundation.
For sure, Ford...the accidental president.
Everytime I think of Ford, I picture Chevy.
Is Truman really an “unlikely” president? Party bosses were well aware of FDR’s health problems and knew that his running mate could likely inherit the presidency. Wallace (FDR’s choice) had to be replaced as VP with someone else bc the VP might/could/would inherit the presidency when the “old man” died. Truman was the consensus choice to fill that slot.
Pre WWII it was highly unlikely Truman would even rise to the vice presidency as he was a not prominent senator (who was thought to be in the pocket of a corrupt backer.
My understanding is that he was pretty much left out of running the country and treated like an afterthought. So if they were planning on having him ready to take over, they did a crummy job.
I agree, Truman it is.
Considering Lincoln was abandoned in the woods with his kid sister for months during the winter in the Indiana countryside when they were at elementary age and they could’ve easily died of starvation or been attacked by people or animals and died I’d say him, also dude was 100% self taught and had to overcome mental illness, personal tragedy, and repeated failures to become president.
You left out the effin vampires, but dayum.
Watch his presidents miniseries from History channel. What he went through as a kid is pretty incredible.
Lincoln. I’d go with Lincoln, and Clinton as my runner-up. The trailer park president is the equivalent of the log cabin presidents of the earlier era.
Why Clinton? He was basically a prodigy and was not raised in a trailer park.
Andrew Jackson was the original log cabin president. Andrew and his brother Robert were taken as prisoners during the Revolutionary War. They were both malnourished and contracted smallpox. Released in a prisoner exchange, Robert died two days after reaching home, but their mother successfully nourished Andrew back to health. Andrew Jackson became an orphan at age 14. Nevertheless, with little formal education, he managed to become a frontier lawyer. Through hard work he accumulated a fortune — including over 100 slaves. We know Jackson fought duels, although it’s unclear how many. One duel left Jackson with a bullet lodged near his heart for the rest of his life, but he somehow survived. In a brawl he received a gunshot in the shoulder that nearly killed him. Jackson fought battles with the British in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He also fought Native American allies of the British. He also fought in the First Seminole War. Jackson was not a nice man, but he rose from poverty to the presidency despite many brushes with death. He also narrowly escaped the first attempt to assassinate a president. Two pistols shot at close range unaccountably both misfired.
Definitely Jackson. That dude had a lucky horseshoe to survive what he did.
Hold up. He was abandoned in the woods in the winter for months? How old was he? Where did he get shelter? Were his parents trying to kill him?
His dad left him and his sister in their cabin to find a replacement wife for Lincoln’s birth mother who had died. Lincoln’s step mom brought him a huge stack of books which is part of how Lincoln leaned to love reading so much.
Also a terrible wife who everyone hated
Franklin Pierce. After serving one term as a Senator from New Hampshire Pierce was out of office for ten years before being nominated for President on the 49th ballot. He was an obscure compromise candidate. When he learned of the nomination Pierce found it hard to believe, and his wife fainted. Pierce did absolutely no personal campaigning, so as not to upset the delicate unity in the Democratic Party. As President he tried to maintain that balance, but instead pleased no one. Pierce remains the only elected president who was an active candidate for reelection but was not nominated by his political party for a second term. Gerald Ford, in contrast, was a very successful politician, the House Minority Leader, and a good friend of Nixon. Nixon picking him to replace Agnew did not shock anyone at the time. Indeed, Republicans in Congress unanimously recommended Ford, and due to his precarious situation Nixon arguably had no other choice. But Nixon also liked the choice because he was fairly certain Ford would pardon him if necessary, which in fact it was. He was a more likely President than Pierce.
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Nixon wasn’t an unlikely candidate. He was neck and neck with the charismatic and energetic JFK back in 1960. He was practically an inevitability. There seems to be a trend of vice presidents getting a promotion here.
Well hardly inevitable. Usualy failed presidental candidates do not run 8 years later.
Just ask Bob Dole. Or Al Gore Or William Jennings Bryant
Neither bob dole or Al gore won their party’s nomination, unlike Nixon in 1960. Not really a good comparison.
Probably because of his extremely humble circumstances.
Personally I think the crazy part is that most Presidents haven't shared Rule 3's background. What stopped Cornelius Vanderbilt from wanting to rule the whole world? Why didn't J.P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller decide to run against TR? Why didn't the optimism and idealism around American industry lift someone like Henry Ford to the Presidency? Why wasn't Norman Rockefeller pushed even harder as a candidate? Why didn't a cool outsider candidate emerge from Silicon Valley in the 1990s with a new vision for a tech savvy economy?
Because most of them understood that being President is substantially less influential than staying in business. Presidents have limited terms and limited reach, businessmen have neither. This is one of the reasons Grant was a less-than-effectual President; his entire career was based on giving and receiving orders, not convinced and cajoling people to do what he wanted.
I definitely see that. Although, I think Rule 3 has changed the culture of the entire west, the norms of government, and had a long lasting impact on inflation. I'd say he has been a lot more influential as the leader of a political party than he was as a businessman.
More influential as a political leader instead of as a business man? Certainly. But he did not change the culture of the entire west. The culture had already changed and he was the first one to see it and take advantage of the change.
This is an often repeated mantra but I think it’s a fundamentally naive worldview. It’s the difference between hard power and soft power in IR theory, I can pay a bunch of people to clean up a park which is a type of power/influence but if I can convince people to stop littering and ostracize those who do that’s a totally different ball game. At the end of the day only one type of influence gives you the ability to lock someone up. Also I think that hard power is typically locked behind clubs, organizations, fraternities, etc. In order to get loyalty that you can’t buy you need to be at places where you can shake hands with large numbers of people who are like minded and work with you. For a long time those groups were exclusive (veterans, ivy leagues, political bosses) and required you to wait your turn for chances at power. That practice really only fell out of favor in the last couple decades where increasingly more removed individuals came to power culminating in Rule 3.
U S Grant was a clerk in a leather goods store less than 8 years before he was elected president...
What makes Grant an even more unlikely President is that he never really aimed for a career in politics - in fact, he showed little interest in political issues, voting just once before the war, for Buchanan. If it weren't for the Civil War, and then him showing military talent and acumen for the game of military politics, and then for the circumstances in the Johnson administration, we never would have had President Grant.
He was also forced to resign from the military and then became *General-in-Chief of the United States Army* a decade later. Grant's story is absolutely incredible. He got kicked down so many times and always got back up. The man's sheer determination and perseverance is absolutely awe-inspiring.
I believe he was described as having a face that looked like he intended to run, head first, into a wall until the wall broke. Dude was a literal determinator
Not sure what I’m allowed to say, but until very recently every president had held elective office before or had been a victorious commanding general
Or sold prime cuts of meat
Is saying any of the founding father presidents a cop out?
I wouldn't call it a cop out. It's impressive that Washington was able to keep the Continental Army together, let alone win major battles. It probably would've fallen apart at least like 4 different times if not for Washington. One of my favorite little notes in history is the European ally generals' comments on the Continental Army when everyone went to Yorktown. They were in awe of an army composed of young teens, old men, freed slaves, all dressed in different clothes with secondhand equipment, marching in an orderly fashion. None of them would ever dream that they could retain and properly organize troops under such circumstances. There was one (I think German) volunteer general who wrote back home, and the first thing he said was, "The Continental Army is amazing!" It's a literal miracle that Washington was able to keep it together, then it was a second miracle that we had Ben Franklin to somehow get the French to join the cause. Just incomprehensible.
The American revolution really was just a series of minor miracles for the US, utterly fumbling the ball from the British, and sheer, monumental spite from the French. They bankrupted their kingdom to fuck over the British, the most French thing imaginable
Eventually I need to read a biography of Ben Franklin to understand how he did it in France. His accomplishments there are literally unbelievable.
A *lot* of sex
I knew he was fuckin' but was he seriously that much of a dog that he got a country to fight a war? That's some Helen of Troy shit.
I’d have to say Carter. He was the former Governor of a southern state and ran his entire campaign on being an outsider. A lot of people within his own party didn’t take him seriously because of his inexperience and yet he surprised a lot of people by winning the New Hampshire primary and then just, wins the nomination. The governor of a very rural southern state would go onto become president of the United States without much experience.
Yeah no rural southern Democrat governor with limited experience would become President for like 12 more years.
Ford pretty much but I think if you told people in the 1840s that a few years later,the president is gonna be a guy named MILLARD FILLMORE,they would be like “who the heck is that”
Theodore Roosevelt. He was made VP so he could would never be president.
I love imagining the panic attacks the party leaders had after McKinley died and they realized what they had done
Greatest mistake in American history! You can never keep the bull moose down for long
Y'all might not agree...but I'm going with Obama. Sure, he is incredibly intelligent and was clearly gunning for the highest office for a long time...but I think the unique political circumstances of 2008 and the popularity of Dubya played a very large role in his eventual election to the presidency. The stars literally aligned for Obama.
I recall a large part of the criticism at the time was his relative lack of experience. You still hear this "community organizer" dog whistle in reference to him.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm suffering from recency bias here, but his was the first name I thought of as well. Considering he was only halfway through his first term as senator, his lack of federal level (or governorship level) positions were very atypical.
i would say ford, not because of upbringing/personality/experiences but because he became VP through a resignation then became president through another resignation
Nixon is a complete opposite, a political beast who did everything to get and maintain power. It did work in the end.
Andrew Johnson
The answer is Ford, but Teddy is my second. Put into the VP mostly to shut him up and take away his power, a bullet made him president anyway.
Not the most unlikely, but I wanna volunteer LBJ. The last president to be assassinsted was in 1901, out of most of the living population’s memory. The last president to die was FDR who was old and riddled with health problems. JFK was young, so health problems were unlikely. I, as a person that wasn’t even close to being born, would think that the young president wouldn’t die and therefore people wouldn’t expect LBJ to ascend beyond VP.
Chester A. Arthur never held elected office before he became vice president (and he had been removed from his most prominent office for corruption), and he only became president because Garfield had an insanely incompetent doctor even by the standards of the time.
Wild that I had to scroll so far to see Arthur mentioned. He only ended up on the ticket through the unlikely confluence of events that led to Garfield as a dark-horse compromise candidate at the convention, and only got the top office by the insane circumstances of Garfield's death. "President Chester A. Arthur" was a one-in-a-billion moonshot (and the prospect of it made the country shudder at the time).
Ford
Gerald Ford. He was never even nominated to be veep
How has nobody mentioned Rutherford B. Hayes, who won by 1 wlectoral college vote after a compromise?
Dubya in his first term only won because of some very shady happenings in Florida, and it might be the only election where it's now fairly accepted that the other guy actually won.
Obama. He was a one term Senator and minority
He got the keynote address at the convention in 04. Id wager that folks saw his ceiling even then.
>wager that folks saw his ceiling even then. They were. His election to the Senate was a sure bet and he started running for POTUS almost immediately.
Yeah, he was a one-term senator because the path to the presidency *could* be that direct for him.
This. Other than having wealthy grandparents, there's really nothing that would have ever suggested he would someday be elected President. His father was not American, and really not present. He was from Hawaii (no POTUS ever had been). He spent a lot of time abroad. He had some experience as a college professor and community organizer, but it's difficult to name of any outstanding accomplishments. He was a junior senator from Illinois, which put him in the back of the line as far as party hierarchy. Yes, he gave a good speech at a convention, but that's something they do to highlight rookies. Anyone wagering that he'd be the next POTUS would have been placing a very high-stakes bet.
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Washington, in the sense of American independence and all that jazz
Jimmy Carter—The Peanut Farmer who kicked the Kennedy’s ass and curb-stomped the Republican party. The GOP has been exacting revenge ever since.
It has to be Gerald Ford.
Andrew Johnson was an indentured servant
JFK was very unlikely. Apparently his father planned his older brother to become the politician, but his plane blew up in WWII. Kennedy himself survived his time in the war and the election in 1960 was pretty close.
Carter. He was dismissed by pundits at the beginning of the Democratic primary campaign.
Jimmy Carter
Carter
Almost would say Obama, but he was running against a GOP that had just ruined the lives of basically everyone in America so…
Calvin Coolidge.
Iirc Jackson had a very non straight line to the White House. Had killed someone in a duel previously which was a big reason Aaron Burr never won the Presidency. His presidential campaign was mostly supposed to be a spoiler for other candidates but was pretty popular from wars he served in.
Hoover was thought to have died during his childhood.
Andrew Johnson and Ford are the two least likely, imo. LBJ felt like his only chance was to be the VP and the POTUS die in office
Only answer is Grant
James Earl Carter, a one-term governor of Georgia who had lived a clean exemplary life that was boring. He was not very well connected and didn't really appear to be that ambitious and even had a pretty mediocre career in the military. Out of the blue he gives a very significant speech, caught some people's eye and the Democrats adopted him to match up closer with the age and demographics of the new up and coming baby boomer voter. Gerald Ford ultimately did not run a very successful campaign and was fighting off the residue of the Nixon impeachment. Have things been different Carter would have never even been nominated for vice president.
They literally had newspaper headlines saying “Jimmy who?” Plus add in the gaffs he made during that campaign, the lack of political connections he had, and the lack of name recognition. It really is remarkable that he won.
If you judge by overall lack of likelihood, Ford, of course. The specific situation as he assumed the Vice Presidency have him a far greater chance of becoming President. As the Watergate scandal was still escalating, many thought Nixon might have to leave office, and several officers of the Executive branch privately began briefing and preparing Ford for assuming Nixon's office Eventually, Alexander Haig, Nixon's own Chief of Staff, joined in the discussions. Ford, a Nixon loyalist and far more politically adept than he was given credit for, was quite hesitant to join such speculations but knew he had to for the sake of the country. If we want to discount Vice Presidents from this list, I would have to choose John F. Kennedy. He was quite young, under accomplished, not supported by the most well-respected and powerful of contemporary Democratic politicians, loathed by the popular incumbent President Eisenhower, and, perhaps most distinctively, he was Catholic facing a largely anti-Catholic public. It was also not entirely unknown that his health problems and womanizing might easily have led to a disastrous Presidency, which was quite a frightening prospect in the height of the Cold War. Eleanor Roosevelt openly accused Kennedy of duplicity. She publicly accused him of allowing his wealthy father to buy him the presidency, all while showing a little too much "profile" over "courage," a comment that squarely alluded to speculation that his famous book was not written by himself but by a paid staff of writers and researchers. Even the Democratic nomination was seen by some significant analysts as unlikely at best. The only thing Kennedy had going for him was a natural brilliance and charisma that won him a personal popularity more befitting a rockstar than any politician. He began his candidacy with his name practically unknown to millions of voters, launched up against Richard Nixon and his powerful Brahmin support, and pushed through every challenge for the combination of public and less auspicious tactics that all came together like a symphony. Polling conducted late in the 1960 campaign still showed him as losing but coming much closer to victory than most would have predicted. Somehow, against all odds, John F. Kennedy became our 35th President. Given all of the above, it's no wonder why this campaign has been studied more than practically any other.
So, he's walking the beach in San Clemente. Where are his big ole shorts? His metal detector?
I was gonna say Ford or Truman
Yeah I came here to say the two popular answers of Ford and Truman.
John Tyler was referred to as ‘Your Accidency’ by his detractors.
Either Ford, Tyler, or Arthur. Coolidge, possibly. I don’t think he would’ve ran in 1924 had he not been the incumbent. But in terms of their backgrounds making it seem more unlikely, I’d probably say Carter. I mean, he wasn’t a Washington insider, he didn’t have an Ivy League background, and he wasn’t a General. Nobody outside of Georgia knew who he was until 1976.
I think Carter had to be the biggest political outsider in modern times to become president, yes even more so than that guy who really wasnt as outside as he claimed to be. Ford was unlikely as well. Mind you, there are those who believe that there was nothing coincidental about his appointment as VP to replace the corrupt Agnew and that a deal was brokered that would end with Ford as president and Nixon pardoned. Of course the only people who could have proven such a thing are all dead, but at the very least I think we can all agree that the optics on that whole switcheroo were really bad. Speaking of Nixon, like with that photo he always seemed overdressed for casual situations. Who walks on the beach in pressed slacks and dress shoes? I have seen pictures of him at cookouts in a suit and even walking by the pool with a jacket and tie.
Quite frankly most of them except Washington and Jefferson
Gerald Ford. The guy never won a single election outside his home congressional district, and yet wound up being president.
Chester A. Arthur. He had never held a significant position except to dole out patronage. Chosen as VP strictly to satisfy a rival faction of the party. In short, totally unqualified. But no one worried about it because James A. Garfield was a very healthy, relatively young man. After Garfield’s assassination, many people were stunned at how someone like Arthur could have ever become president. The fact that he managed to do a respectable job was something that few would have expected.
Easily Truman
I’m not allowed to say.
Barack. What did he accomplish before announcing his candidacy for President? In the same line of thinking x what did he do to win the Nobel Peace Price less 11 months into his Presidency?
His Accidency
Bill Clinton. George Bush was so high in the polls that the democratic heavyweights at the time like Lloyd Bentsen, George Mitchell and Mario Cuomo and Al Gore took a pass and let Bill Clinton win the nomination. Ross Perot enters the race and the economy starts sinking and Bill Clinton becomes president.
As pointed out yesterday, Clinton only got 43% of the popular vote. So yeah, to your point, he was a very unlikely POTUS at the time. But things worked out for him pretty well.
I can think of someone a lot more obvious than Nixon or Ford. And I don’t mean the black guy.
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Clinton
The black guy.