Latest news with #andTylerToo
Toronto Sun
08-08-2025
- Politics
- Toronto Sun
GOLDBERG: Kamala Harris won't cure what's ailing the Democratic Party
US Vice President Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris waves at supporters as she walks off stage after speaking at Howard University in Washington, DC, on November 6, 2024. Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, was the last commander in chief born a British subject and the first member of the Whig Party to win the White House. He delivered the longest inaugural address in history, nearly two hours, and had the shortest presidency, being the first sitting president to die in office, just 31 days into his term. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Oh, there is one more bit of trivia about the man who gave us the slogan 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Harrison was the last politician to lose his first presidential election and then win the next one (Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson managed that before him). Richard Nixon lost only to win way down the road. (Grover Cleveland and Trump are the only two to win, lose and then win again.) Everyone else since Harrison's era who lost on the first try and ran again in the next election lost again. Democrat Adlai Stevenson and Republican Thomas Dewey ran twice and lost twice. Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan each ran three times in a row and lost (Clay ran on three different party tickets). Voters, it seems, don't like losers. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. These are not encouraging results for Kamala Harris, who announced last week she will not be running for governor in California, sparking speculation that she wants another go at the White House. But history isn't what she should worry about. It's the here and now. The Democratic Party is wildly unpopular. Its net favourability (minus 30 points) is nearly triple the Republicans' (minus 11 points). The Democratic Party is more unpopular than at any time in the last 35 years. When Donald Trump's unpopularity with Democrats should have the opposite effect, 63% of Americans have an unfavourable view of the party. Why? Because Democrats are mad at their own party — both for losing to Trump and for failing to provide much of an obstacle to him now that he's in office. As my Dispatch colleague Nick Cattogio puts it, 'Even Democrats have learned to hate Democrats.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. It's not all Harris' fault. Indeed, the lion's share of the blame goes to Joe Biden and the coterie of enablers who encouraged him to run again. Harris' dilemma is that she symbolizes Democratic discontent with the party. That discontent isn't monolithic. For progressives, the objection is that Democrats aren't fighting hard enough. For the more centrist wing of the party, the problem is that the Democrats are fighting for the wrong things, having lurched too far left on culture war and identity politics. Uniting both factions is a visceral desire to win. That's awkward for a politician best known for losing. Almost the only reason Harris was positioned to be the nominee in 2024 was that she was a diversity pick. Biden was explicit that he would pick a woman and, later, an African American running mate. And the same dynamic made it impossible to sideline her when Biden withdrew. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Of course, most Democrats don't see her race and gender as a problem and, in the abstract, they shouldn't. Indeed, every vice-presidential pick is a diversity pick, including the white guys. Running mates are chosen to appeal to some part of a coalition. So Harris' problem isn't her race or sex; it's her inability to appeal to voters in a way that expands the Democratic coalition. For Democrats to win, they need someone who can flip Trump voters. She didn't lose because of low Democratic turnout; she lost because she's uncompelling to a changing electorate. Her gauzy, often gaseous, rhetoric made her sound like a dean of students at a small liberal arts college. Her convictions sounded like they were crafted by focus groups at a time when voters craved authenticity. Worse, Harris acquiesced to Joe Biden's insistence that she not distance herself from him. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Such clubby deference to the establishment, combined with boilerplate pandering to progressive constituencies — learned from years of San Francisco and California politics — makes her the perfect solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Her choice to appear on Stephen Colbert's The Late Show for her first interview since leaving office was telling. CBS recently announced it was terminating both Colbert and the show, insisting it was purely a business decision. But the reason for the broadcast network's decision stemmed in part from the fact that Colbert narrowcasts his expensive show to a very small, very anti-Trump slice of the electorate. 'I don't want to go back into the system. I think it's broken,' Harris lamented to Colbert, decrying the 'naive' and 'feckless' lack of 'leadership' and the 'capitulation' of those who 'consider themselves to be guardians of our system and our democracy.' That's all catnip to Colbert's ideologically committed audience. But that's not the audience Democrats need to win. And that's why, if Democrats nominate her again, she'll probably go down in history as an answer to a trivia question. And it won't be, 'Who was the 48th president of the United States?' 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Boston Globe
31-05-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 1840s president, dies at 96
Mr. Tyler suffered a series of small strokes starting in 2012 and was later diagnosed with dementia. In recent years, his son William Bouknight Tyler oversaw the James River plantation that had been his family's ancestral home. Mr. Tyler, a retired businessman, and his older brother, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr., who died at age 95 in 2020, were sons of Lyon Gardiner Tyler Sr. (1853-1935), a longtime president of the College of William & Mary. Their grandfather was the U.S. president who pushed for the annexation of Texas as American expansion moved west, but he is perhaps best known for the Whig Party's memorable 1840 presidential campaign slogan, 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In a remarkable instance of successive longevities and late-in-life paternities, the Tyler family produced a genealogical marvel, if not a singularity: three generations that spanned nearly the entire history of the American experience. Advertisement Successive longevities over centuries are not uncommon, although they are not easily documented in ordinary families. But that was hardly the case with the former president and his academically distinguished son. And in 2012, when the website Mental Floss reported that two grandsons of President Tyler were still alive, the news -- 'an amazing, seemingly impossible piece of American trivia,' as New York magazine put it -- went viral. Advertisement Yahoo, The Huffington Post, Fox News and Politico all rushed to publish articles. There were interviews with the grandsons, who told of other famous ancestors, including a great-grandfather, John Tyler Sr., born in 1747, who was a roommate of Thomas Jefferson at William & Mary, served in the Continental Army, became governor of Virginia and had eight children, including the future president. 'I heard too much about presidents growing up,' Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. told the Daughters of the American Revolution chapter in Dyersburg, Tennessee, in 2013. He recalled family anecdotes about Patrick Henry, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, the American Revolution, the Civil War and, especially, President John Tyler, his grandfather. Born in 1790, less than a year after Washington's first inauguration, John Tyler became the governor of Virginia, a United States representative and a senator. In the election of 1840, the Whig Party chose William Henry Harrison, a former governor of the Indiana Territory and senator from Ohio, as its presidential candidate, and John Tyler as his vice-presidential running mate. Historians say John Tyler, a lifelong slave owner and advocate of states' rights, was selected to balance the ticket and attract Southerners who feared Harrison might harbor abolitionist leanings. Harrison, known as Old Tippecanoe, had led American forces that defeated Native Americans at the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana in 1811. The Whigs attacked Martin Van Buren, the Democratic incumbent, with a bandwagon campaign featuring the 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too' slogan. Harrison and John Tyler won handily and were sworn in on March 4, 1841. But Harrison died of pneumonia after only a month in office. John Tyler, the first vice president to succeed a dead president, quickly took the oath of office, moved into the White House and assumed the full powers of the presidency. Advertisement His claim to the presidency was disputed by many in Congress and never accepted by some, who referred to him as 'His Accidency.' But his forceful grasp of the office set a precedent and served as a model for successions until the issue was clarified by the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967. John Tyler, who regarded much of the Whig platform as unconstitutional, vetoed legislation and bypassed Whig leaders, who expelled him from the party and tried, unsuccessfully, to impeach him. Most of his Cabinet resigned. His most notable achievement was his advocacy for the annexation of Texas, which became the nation's 28th state in 1845. Robert Seager II, in a 1963 biography, 'And Tyler Too,' called John Tyler 'one of America's most obscure chief executives,' adding, 'His countrymen generally remember him, if they have heard of him at all, as the rhyming end of a catchy campaign slogan.' After leaving the presidency, John Tyler retired to his Virginia plantation and withdrew from politics. When the Civil War began in 1861, he sided with the Confederacy and was elected to the Confederate legislature, but he died in 1862, at age 71, before taking office. He fathered 15 children, the most of any American president, with two wives: Letitia Christian, who died in 1842, and Julia Gardiner, a 24-year-old debutante who married him in 1844, when he was 54. The 13th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, who lived to 81, served as president of William & Mary, the nation's second oldest college (chartered in 1693), from 1888 to 1919. He had three children with his first wife, Anne Baker (Tucker) Tyler, who died in 1921. In 1923, he married Sue Ruffin, and they had three more children: Lyon Gardiner Jr., Harrison Ruffin and Henry, who died in infancy. Advertisement Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who was born in Virginia on Nov. 9, 1928, earned a degree in chemistry at William & Mary in 1949 and a chemical engineering degree at Virginia Tech in 1951. In 1968, he was a founder of ChemTreat, an industrial water treatment business. He retired in 2000. Mr. Tyler married Frances Payne Bouknight in 1957; she died in 2019. In addition to their son William, he is survived by their daughter, Julia Gardiner Tyler Samaniego; another son, Harrison Ruffin Tyler Jr.; and eight grandchildren. Mr. Tyler and his wife helped to restore his ancestral home, Sherwood Forest Plantation, a 1,600-acre National Historic Landmark on the James River in Charles City County, Virginia, and lived there for many years. The plantation was built around 1730 and bought by the family in 1842. In 2001, Mr. Tyler donated $5 million and 22,000 books to the College of William & Mary history department, which was renamed in his honor in 2021. In 2012, he told New York magazine that he was not much interested in modern politics. 'Oh, my family's conservative,' he said. 'I served as the chairman of the Republican Party here, but I'm sorry, I've sort of lost interest. They're killing each other, on both sides. The campaigns are just horrible. It has nothing to do with what we really need.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
