Al Smith -vs- Herbert Hoover

[JohnnyRingo]

Though I know many DUers already know who Al Smith was, and why they hold an annual dinner in his honor, I admit I didn't.
Other than knowledge that he was a politician in the Roaring Twenties, I knew nothing.

Thanx to the researchers at Mental Floss, here's an excerpt of the dirty campaigning that makes the election of 1928 relevant today. Reading it, I found myself thinking over and over, "just like now", and wondering if the Republican Party has had a fresh idea in 80 years:

Last night, John McCain and Barack Obama attended the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City, where they told jokes in white ties. In case you’re not familiar, former New York Governor Al Smith (1873-1944) was the Democratic nominee in the 1928 presidential election, and was defeated by Herbert Hoover. Think this year’s campaign has been dirty? Joseph Cummins, author of Anything for a Vote, looks back at what passed for mudslinging in the Roaring Twenties.

The Election of 1928
On August 2, 1927, while vacationing in his “Summer White House” in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Calvin Coolidge walked outside to waiting reporters and handed them a slip of paper that read: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen-twenty-eight.” Taking no questions, Silent Cal walked back inside his house—and out of the presidency.

No one could quite figure out why Coolidge had made this decision. The economy was booming, and the president, despite or because of his rock-bottom New England reticence and numerous eccentricities, was quite popular. Perhaps he still harbored grief from the death by blood poisoning of his sixteen-year-old son Calvin Jr. in 1924. Or perhaps it was because, as Mrs. Coolidge allegedly said, “Papa says there’s going to be a depression.”
Whatever the reason, Coolidge’s choice not to run set the scene for an election that was, in the words of one historian, “one of the most revolting spectacles in the nation’s history.”


Continued here:
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/19391

The lesson to be learned is, Herbert Hoover won on negative campaigning, and it musn't happen again.