Has anyone ever come out after the election, say, and said" Well, they asked me, but I didn’t want to/was too busy/wanted to spend time with my family and/or hookers?"
I know people are asked it hypothetically, but I wonder if anyone’s ever gotten a real invitation and said no?
The U.S. presidency?
There is too much effort involved in getting elected, (true even back in the simpler days of Washington and weaker political parties and more involvement by state legislatures) for anyone to discover that they have been elected without their knowledge or consent.
Two famous refusals were those of William Tecumseh Sherman who was suggested as a draft replacement for Grant (“If nominated, I will not run; if elected I will not serve.”, and Calvin Coolidge who did not like the hoopla of being president and declined to run for re-election ("*I do not choose to run."**)
Colin Powell’s a more recent example of somebody who probably could have been nominated but repeatedly stated he did not want to be.
Well, there’s always LBJ, but I don’t know of anyone actually elected who declined to take the office, unless you count Zacahary Taylor’s deciding to wait a day before taking the oath.
I’m not sure what you mean. Quite obviously, no one has ever turned down service as president or vice president after receiving a majority of the electoral votes.
Likewise, no one has ever turned down a major party presidential nomination after it was formally tendered by a national convention. Three people, however, have turned down major party vice presidential nominations after they were tendered.
Innumerable people have declined to run, even when asked by private citizens, or by party leaders, or (in the case of modern vice presidential candidates) by the presidential candidate. Whether they would have been nominated or elected had they run must remain hypothetical. The list of such people could fill up a room, and would certainly include (among many others) Senator Ted Kennedy, who refused to run for president in 1968 or vice president in 1972 despite pressure to do so.
Unless I’m mistaken, the OP is asking whether, after an election, *someone else *announced that he had actually been his party’s first choice, but declined … and this was kept secret until after the election.
I think Al Gore is in the same category nowadays.
How would one ascertain whether a person was “his party’s first choice”, other than by votes cast in public at a national convention?
And honestly, politics is a lot more subtle than that, just for this kind of reason. You only offer a job to someone who you know will take it.
Allegedly, Lord Halifax declined the office of Prime Minister in favour of Winston Churchill.
In addition, Rutherford Hayes did not run for re-election in 1880, having previously promised that he would only serve one term.
(And on a historical note, the 1876 election which he won was far more controversial than the 2000 election, but Hayes was not a controversial president after being elected).
Well, in 1980, Ronald Reagan was trying very hard to get Gerald Ford to be his running mate. They were deep in negotiations, and all the networks were VERY close to announcing that it was about to happen. But when Reagan showed up at the convention center, he announced that he and Ford hadn’t been able to come to terms (Ford apparently wanted a lot more power and responsibility than most Vice Presidents before him had been given), and announced thta George H.W. Bush would be the nominee.
In that instance, it’s pretty clear Ford could have been VP, but said no, because he wasn’t interested in sitting around waiting for Reagan to die.
Wait… Ford was pretty much total poison for pardoning Nixon, and nobody had ever actually voted for him, and he was made fun of as a klutz. GHWB ran the CIA and made shit happen around the same time. So, I gotta do it. Cite?
Despite Watergate, and despite the Nixon pardon, and despite being 30 points behind in the polls in June, Ford came within two percentage points of beating Jimmy Carter. After Carter’s popularity plunged to Bush-like levels, Ford looked better in hindsight. He certainly wasn’t considered “total poison” in 1980.
The Reagan-Ford ticket was reported as a done deal by Walter Cronkite and CBS at the 1980 Republican National Convention. Cronkite’s reporting wasn’t quite accurate, as Edwin Meese makes clear.
Definitely. He could have been the first black president, but he had the good sense (IMHO) to walk away from politics with his integrity intact.
I’m really not sure – are you being serious?
You can never be certain about anything hypothetical in politics, but Colin Powell did look to have as good a chance as anyone of gaining the Republican nomination and getting elected as anyone did at the time.
I believe that his question referred to the “dignity intact” part.
Ah – well, that’s even more hypothetical. Of course, there’s an awful ot of mud slung around in US politics these days, but if you don’t let it stick, then your dignity can remain intact (IMHO).
Sure, and there’s even mud slung around if you were to, say serve as Secretary of State 