WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 -- Pundits have been busy wringing their hands about the difficulties that await the victorious candidate in the long-playing election of 2000.
After all, George W. Bush will be only the fourth person to win the presidency while losing the popular vote, with the smallest margin of electoral votes (4) of any president since Rutherford B. Hayes (1). By the standards of 20th-century transitions, this might be a tad more difficult than some -- but by 19th-century standards, it's going to be a piece of cake. Bush's party has control (barely) of both Houses of Congress; the country is not in crisis; and he has his usual advantage of low expectations.
And he has such modern luxuries as transition offices, transition briefings, and transition budgets. Many presidents entered government when all the records of the previous administration had been taken with them.
It is, moreover, a fact that the two men who had what must be considered the worst transitions, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, might have been the two greatest presidents that America has had since George Washington.
Let's look at the record. There have been 41 transitions -- 11 between presidents of the same party, 20 between presidents of different parties, and nine abrupt transitions between a president and a vice president. The last one, in 1845, was from John Tyler, who had been elected as a Whig but was really a State's Right Democrat, to another Democrat, James K. Polk, is a bit hard to classify. Since Polk pursued most of Tyler's policies, it could be counted as a same-party transition.
Transitions between presidents of the same party have generally, but not always, been relatively smooth. Unfortunately, those smooth transitions have not usually led to good results.
The first transition in American history, from Washington to John Adams, led the latter to keep the former's entire Cabinet -- and then to dismiss them when he discovered that they were more loyal to Alexander Hamilton than to him. The next three intra-party transitions, from Jefferson to Madison to Monroe to John Quincy Adams, all involved the Secretary of State moving up to the presidency, and therefore weren't too difficult. The new president already knew the players in Washington and in office.Albert Gallatin, for example, served as secretary of the Treasury through the entire Jefferson and Madison administrations.
The same might be said of Martin Van Buren taking over from Jackson (although vice president, Van Buren had been Secretary of State in Jackson's first administration, and kept most Cabinet members) and James Buchanan taking over from Franklin Pierce (Buchanan had been Secretary of State in Polk's administration). It should be noted that the last three of these administrations have all been judged by historians to have been failures.
The transition from U.S. Grant to Rutherford B. Hayes was, of course, one of the more difficult ones. Hayes was not even declared president until the day before he was sworn in, and he was sworn in privately in case his formal swearing in was disrupted by angry Democrats. Hayes faced a Democratic majority in the House, and his first major act (because of the deal that made him president) was to withdraw federal troops from the South, thereby handing over the faithful Black Republicans there to their enemies. As president, Hayes soon found himself alternately fighting with both parties in the Congress. His veto of the Bland-Allison Silver Act was overridden; his attempt to replace Republican "Stalwarts" Chester Arthur, the collector of customs in New York, and Alonzo Cornell, the port naval officer, was met by their refusal to resign, by the Senate's refusal to replace them and by Hayes suspending the two men when Congress wasn't in session. In 1879, he fought with the Democratic Senate majority when he vetoed five bills with Democratic "riders" attached to them -- all concerning federal rights to intervene in Southern elections.
Hayes' Republican successor, James Garfield, took up the same fight with the "Stalwarts" that Hayes had, by appointing another foe of New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling's, William H. Robertson, as Port Collector. The two senators from New York, Conkling and Tom Platt, resigned in protest two months later, expecting to get re-elected by the State Legislature. Instead, a crazed Stalwart shot Garfield, and he died after several months in agony). His death sealed the political death of his opponents.
William Howard Taft was Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of War, and became his handpicked successor, but his mentor became his enemy by 1910, and his rival in 1912. Herbert Hoover, who had been a dominating figure in the Harding and Coolidge Cabinets from his position as Secretary of Commerce, was given a year to campaign for president when Coolidge withdrew from contention for re-election in 1927. His transition was easy, but nothing else about his administration was. Finally, the transition from Reagan to Bush seems to have been fairly smooth. Bush had played a major role in a series of Republican administrations, so he knew what he was doing, inside the Beltway, at least. Outside proved to be another matter.
In other words, except for the two later members of the "Virginia dynasty," no president who succeeded a president of his own party by winning an election was elected to a second term. Indeed, one of them was assassinated, two voluntarily served only a single term, and six of them were defeated for re-election.
