What are the most outrageous claims ever made on the presidential campaign trail?

[qazwart]

[url=http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3308/what-are-the-most-outrageous-claims-ever-made-on-the-presidential-campaign-trail]What is the most outrageous claim ever made on the presidential campaing trail?

That’s easy!

If elected I will represent your interests and not those of special interest despite the fact they gave me a gazzillion dollars and flew me in their luxurious corporate plane to Korea where I got to play three rounds of golf with Catherine Zeta-Jones.

[qazwart]

Given our nation’s dismal track record on issues of race, it’s no shocker that a lot of such smear jobs involved claiming a candidate might have some nonwhite relatives.

This reminds me of the Black Hand Photographs. In the South, the best way to degrade your opponent was to have a photo of your opponent shaking hands with a black man. Photographers would follow the opponent around waiting for the moment they might be over friendly with a person of color.

This type of thing still goes on today. In the Jewish community, Trump supporters are passing around this photograph of Hillary Clinton having her picture taken with the Arafats.

[watchwolf49]

Richard Mentor Johnson was the Vice-Presidential candidate in 1836. He didn’t received a majority of Electoral votes so the Senate voted him in. Although Virginia’s 23 votes were casted for Van Buran for President, they refused to vote for Johnson as Vice-President because:

Johnson never married. Family tradition recounts that he ended an early romance, vowing revenge for his mother’s interference, after Jemima Johnson pronounced his intended bride unworthy of the family. He later lived openly with Julia Chinn, a mulatto slave raised by his mother and inherited from his father, until her death from cholera in 1833. Johnson freely acknowledged the relationship, as well as the two daughters born to the union, and entrusted Julia with full authority over his business affairs during his absences from Blue Spring Farm.

– Mark O. Hatfield, with the Senate Historical Office. Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789- 1993 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), pp. 121-131. {PDF format, page 6}

Maybe not the most outrageous thing said, the difference being it was truth rather than lie.

[dtilque]

@qazwart

This type of thing still goes on today. In the Jewish community, Trump supporters are passing around this photograph of Hillary Clinton having her picture taken with the Arafats.

And not too long back, the Kerry-Fonda photoshopped picture.