Word: clevelandism
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...Pedro Martinez, 28, the Red Sox have--with due respect to Arizona's Randy Johnson--the best pitcher in baseball. After winning 23 games and losing only four in 1999, then performing postseason heroics against Cleveland and New York, Martinez has won nine games this year and lost two--with an average of 12 strikeouts for every nine innings he pitches. What's most impressive about Martinez is his earned-run average: the number of runs that opposing teams score against him, without help from errors, for every nine innings that he pitches. In this ERA of a lively baseball...
...This was Cleveland's famous illegitimate tyke, 10 years old in 1884, who would be immortalized in the song, "Ma! Ma! Where's My Pa?" - "Little Tom Tid was a frolicsome kid/ A cute little cuss I declare...
...Cleveland, a bachelor but an improbable rake, acknowledged the child, for whom he had provided support payments to Maria Halpin all along. "Above all," Cleveland instructed his people, "tell the truth." An admirable thought. The New York Sun's Charles A. Dana wrote: "We do not believe that the American people will knowingly elect to the Presidency a coarse debauchee who would bring his harlots with him to Washington, and hire lodgings for them convenient to the White House." By October the Nation judged: "Party contests have never before reached so low a depth of degradation as this." The Democrats...
Blaine was more vulnerable in other areas of venality. Variously, "The Plumed Knight," or "the Continental Liar from the State of Maine," he had so many profitably shady connections and such an improvisational way with the truth that Mark Twain, who joined the Mugwumps (apostate Republicans supporting Cleveland), allowed that Blaine's skill at lying had overwhelmed him, saying "I don't seem to lie with any heart, lately...
...went. (I am harvesting this material from a new biography, "An Honest President: The Life and Presidencies of Grover Cleveland," by H. Paul Jeffers, and from Paul F. Boller, Jr.'s "Presidential Campaigns"). Cleveland was accused of draft-dodging during the Civil War. Blaine got identified with the line about "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion," which backfired and hurt him badly among the urban Catholics he needed in the close race. As historian Horace Samuel Merrill wrote: "The depiction of Blaine as an unrestrained public plunderer and Cleveland as town drunk and debaucher was just a part of the material used...