Outsiders
The person we want as president is somewhere out there.
I’m a Washington outsider.
I love the variation of this message as a candidate highlight.
You can’t clean up Washington by electing people from Washington.
Another dynamite remark from someone who dearly wants to come to Washington.
It seems to be a badge of honor to not be from Washington, DC, because everyone who lives in Washington, DC, is a corrupt, horrible person who lets their dog off leash in neighborhood parks, acting like it’s their backyard.
Being from somewhere specific is not a good predictor that you will be good at something. People get hired all the time to move to another place to perform a job. Where a person is from is never an attribute the company promotes as a reason for the hire.
We hired Bob to be the head of finance at Ford because he is not from Detroit.
And yet, we do it with our national elections, particularly those that elect a president.
People who aspire to top government positions come to Washington with the idea that they will shake things up. We need good-minded people from outside Washington to tell the people of Washington how to do things—like how to walk their dogs in parks. PUT THEM ON LEASHES PEOPLE!
There’s not much appetite for statespersonship when electing a president. I don’t think it is ever a good idea to elect someone president who has never been elected to anything. Can we elect someone who ensures everyone who walks their dog keeps it on a leash? Tackle that job first, and then maybe we can talk about being the president.
The only thing stopping me from becoming president of the United States is that I live in Washington, DC. Also, I have no idea how much money I have. I’m also pretty sensitive.
But mostly, it’s because I’m not an outsider.
The premise is stupid, and stupid is what we got in the following two elections we are ranking.
Let's dive in.
47: The Presidential Election of 2016
Election Date: November 8, 2016
The Candidates:
For some reason, in 2016, Vice President Joe Biden decided not to run for president. I understand his son Beau had died in May of 2015, and I’m sure Joe was still grieving, but man, we could have used him then.
Instead, the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton. Her resume screamed I know how to do this job, having spent nearly thirty years in Washington holding various leadership positions one could only hold while living in Washington. Of course, she also spent the last thirty years getting hammered daily by opposition party members and their strong media partners. In the end, while a statesperson of the highest degree, she was a remarkably weak candidate.
On the other side, we had the Republican Party, and it was in the wilderness.
Have you ever entered the wilderness? Of course not. Do you know who lives there? Wolves.
And that’s who the Republicans nominated, a Wolf of Wall Street, Donald Trump. His primary attribute was being an outsider famous for being a bully.
He defeated about 400 more qualified candidates who tried to claim the mantle of being an outsider. Heck, even Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, tried to claim he was still an outsider simply because he is a Texan.
Didn’t matter. Trump won.
Major Issue of the Day:
The biggest issue of the day happened six days before this election. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series in seven games over my beloved Cleveland Indians. Nothing else mattered leading up to this election.
There were many other issues, but none were compared to the night God sent down a thunderstorm in Game 7, causing a rain delay. After it was over, He handed the Cubs their first championship in over 100 years.
I’ve never gotten over it—or this election.
The Winner:
Liars.
I understand that people lie, especially politicians, but when lying becomes so overt that you need a fact checker when you order something off a menu, it’s a little too much.
Liars took comfort that in a 24-hour news cycle and attention spans that get shorter and shorter by the minute, lying about anything wouldn’t have the backlash it would previously, say in 1999 when we had an impeachment of a president who lied about his martial affairs.
The 2021 OKH Presidential Ranking:
Trump is dead last in the OKH rankings.
I agree that we rank presidents too early after their administrations have ended. But that still won’t change my mind 40 years from now when I’m 88 and doing my 10th version of OKH’s presidential rankings from Ireland.
The States in the Electoral College:
50. The District of Columbia voted for Clinton because we don’t like outsiders.
The Electoral College had 538 members, and the winner needed 270 votes. Trump won 30 states, flipping Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. He even managed to pull an electoral vote out of Maine.
Donald won 304 to 227 despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. Those numbers don’t add up to 538 because seven voters decided not to fulfill their pledge of voting for the person who won that state. Those seven votes were passed around to other candidates like Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, and your neighbor who lets their dog off a leash in the city park.
Why Did I Rank it Here:
I spent 2016 telling everyone who didn’t ask for me to say to them that there was no way Donald Trump would win the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.
Yet he did.
Trump's rise to political power through racism and being a jerk somehow resonated with people who have spent the last few decades being pissed off about the people who live in Washington.
We get the government we deserve.
Next, we head back to the mid-19th century and find another outsider, another tough guy. It didn’t end well either.
Let’s dive in.
46: The Presidential Election of 1848
Election Date: November 7, 1848
The Candidates:
The Whigs were still around at this time, and they nominated Mexican-American War hero General Zachary Taylor, who was such an outsider he never even voted in the presidential election. I don’t know what’s worse, being elected president having never held an elected position or being elected president having never even freaking voted for anyone to be president.
The Whigs were so impressed with this outsiderness that they didn’t run a party platform and instead sent Taylor around to campaign to talk about how he didn’t stand for anything. But hey, he killed a lot of Mexicans, and those types of outsiders are bad ones. Taylor defeated well-known politicians, such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, who had spent a lot of time in Washington.
They doubled down and nominated Millard Fillmore as Vice President. Do people ever ask what it would be like if the vice president needed to become president? If they do, why do they vote for some of these people? How are people not thinking about Kamala Harris becoming president in the next four years?
The Democrats scrambled to find the right candidate to show a sharp contrast. They found one in Lewis Cass, a senator from Michigan at the time and Secretary of War under President Andrew Jackson. He, too, was a general and an outsider while also an insider. Either way, Cass no doubt voted for someone to be president of the United States at some point.
Cass held a weak position on slavery for western territories, which created an opening for former president Martin Van Buren to enter the fray as a Free-Soil candidate.
Major Issue of the Day:
The United States became much bigger after the war with Mexico ended in February. We gained California, Texas, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, and $15 million was spent hiring a marketing firm that came up with the name New Mexico for another territory.
The Winner:
Disaster.
Taylor was president for about a year and a half, succumbing to a stomach issue after eating cherries and ice cream during a Fourth of July holiday.
In that year and a half, he spent much of it outside of Washington, touring parts of the country he wasn’t familiar with.
So, the Outsider president spent most of his time outside of Washington, only to return to Washington and die.
The 2021 OKH Presidential Ranking:
Taylor is ranked 36th, just ahead of Herbert Hoover. There’s not much to say about the man.
The States in the Electoral College:
30. The District of Columbia did not exist, but plenty of outsiders lived there at the time.
Since the last election, Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin have joined the Union. Cass took Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin, leaving Taylor with Florida, with the fewest electoral votes (3).
There were 290 members of the Electoral College, and the winner needed to secure 146 votes. The 1848 election was also the first time we voted on one day.
Old Rough and Ready (Taylor’s nickname) and Cass split the number of states, and Taylor won by the thinnest of margins (about 100,000 votes). He was aided by former president Martin Van Buren, who came in from the outside to run again and took almost 300,000 voters with him.
Why Did I Rank it Here:
I don’t understand our wild obsession with any general from war. I would make a horrible general, yet I cannot run for general. One of my former employers has hired not one but two former admirals to their top two positions. I find that consistency in leadership recruitment fascinating for a social service organization. Both have never raised funds nor held positions as social workers, yet they are in charge. Outsiders even get plum nonprofit jobs.
The 1848 election stinks because Taylor was uninspiring, lasted about a year, and gave us Millard Fillmore, who wasn’t much better.
What do you think? Do we like The Outsiders? How about the movie? It’s pretty good. Have we recovered as a country from the 2016 election?
Anonymous and I are off to Florida for a wedding. It is not ours; we are already married, but it is for friends. I’ll be back on Monday with our weekly review.
I appreciate your continued support and would love any feedback on how you think the election rankings are going.
Okay,
Chris
Seriously. Put a leash on your dogs, people.
First, The Outsiders is my favorite book and has been since middle school. The movie is also excellent and has one of the greatest casts of all time.
Second, an equally bad logic to bringing in an outsider to be President is bringing in someone who can “run the government like a business.” The government isn’t a business, so it’s probably a bad idea to run it like one. A CEO doesn’t have to deal with anything remotely resembling a congress or a judiciary. Also, businesses can’t print their own money. And while some of the leadership traits of a great business executive may be transferable, the skills generally are not. To me, “running the government like a business” sounds about as logical as running a lemonade stand like a venture capital firm. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Third, even if I did believe the government should be run like a business, I can’t fathom how someone would think a reality TV show host who has had six businesses go bankrupt and has a reputation for shady business dealings could be a competent - not even good - POTUS.
Half the country has lost its mind.