Horace Greeleywas a pretty fringe character. He didn’t have a prayer of winning, but the Dems had to nominate somebody.
Aaron Burr might qualify as well.
That was also who I first thought of.
I would have embraced that suggestion wholeheartedly in 2008 if it had been extended to include running mates.
IIRC, didn’t some major players, like LBJ, etc… consider McGovern a bit of a nutcase?
I can’t remember, but, The Making of the President, 1972, or some such book, quoted LBJ (??) as calling McG crazy, or a fruitcake, or looneytunes, or something like that. Another of my readings, again, can’t remember, had one of the players in the Democratic party calling him, behind the scenes, wacko.
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Seconded on both counts. Stockdale’s one hell of a man.
If Bachman wins the nomination, she will certainly exceed the nuttiness of any other candidate ever. Goldwater, even if his politics were crazy, was in some ways an admirable person. It is certainly arguable that Andrew Jackson was pretty off-the-wall and he actually won. He abolished the US National Bank and that led to repeated depressions. The tea party wants to abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, incidentally and I assume Bachman is with them on that. As for Bryan, he was not nutty as a candidate and even his opposition to Darwinism was likely because of the prominence of social Darwinism that seemed a corollary. Eugenics was big in those days. Lots of people thought that FDR was utterly nuts (and they are still arguing–I recently read such a letter in the NY Times–that the new deal policies kept the depression going for eight more years).
If you told a psychiatrist that your ambition was to be a politician of national stature, he would certainly consider a diagnosis of delusions of grandeur.
Consider, sure, but not conclude. If you were a 30-year-old city councilwoman with degrees from Stanford, that might be a very rational (albeit ambitious) goal.
Greeley would definitely be my pick. Over thirty years as an editor and editorialist, he had flirted with all sorts of fringe causes like spiritualism, phrenology, socialism, free love, and the all-important promotion of brown bread. In modern terms, he had way too long of a “paper trail”.
Of course, one of his fringe causes was opposition to slavery, before it was cool, so it’s hard to be too hard on the guy. But, he was definitely a nutcake. He was originally nominated by the Liberal Republicans, a faction of dissident Republicans that disliked Grant for various, and sometimes contradictory, reasons. Then the Democrats nominated him as well, even though he had never been a Democrat. It was as if the Democrats in 1992 had nominated Perot as the only way to keep up a united front against Bush.
I admit that I don’t know anything about Barry Goldwater or his mental soundness, but the following has always tickled me:
Goldwater '64 campaign slogan: In your heart, you know he’s right
Democrat riposte: In your guts, you know he’s nuts
It’s a little off-topic, but I have to mention my favorite politician, an Italian who ran for parliament in the 1920s on a four-plank platform: 1) Sell all the works of art in Italian museums to foreign countries, 2) take the money and build the world’s strongest army, 3) conquer the rest of the world, and 4) take back the works of art.