You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [82]
Here’s why those same beloved presidents would lose to Walter Mondale today.
5. ABRAHAM “HAMMY” LINCOLN
How beloved was he?
After naming a town after him and putting his face on two kinds of money, we apologized for the insufficient tribute by carving his face into a mountain. Then we built a body for the head and put it in a giant stone temple on prime real estate in the nation’s capital. Even this was insufficient for the mighty Lincoln, so we named a log and town car after him. And thus was he sated.
Why today’s media would destroy him
Even if he wasn’t hideous under all that face camouflage, his voice sounded like SpongeBob’s. All his transcendent, three-hour, world-changing speeches were delivered in a piercing falsetto contemporaries described as “shrill, squeaking, piping, unpleasant.” Not to mention his “flesh, wrinkled and dry” or his “doughnut complexion.” At the time, the ability to talk like a teakettle probably helped Lincoln’s unamplified voice reach the nosebleeds. Nowadays, an annoying sound can easily torpedo a presidential campaign. If you don’t believe it, just ask Howard Dean how he’s been doing lately.
4. JAMES “WHERE’D ’E GO?” MADISON
How beloved was he?
Madison wrote most of the Constitution, the first ten amendments, a third of The Federalist Papers, and an early outline of The Da Vinci Code. The man had the foresight to invent the concept of checks and balances, and the balls to immediately discard them by presiding over the Louisiana Purchase as secretary of state.
You know Madison Square Garden? Guess who it’s named after. Yes, for two hundred years the father of the Constitution has graced every Knicks home game, Kings of Leon encore, and WrestleMania with a sense of ancient and noble wisdom.
Why today’s media would destroy him
Because he was tiny. Not just small, pixieish. At five foot four, he was the shortest man to ever hold the office, a full seven inches shorter than the presidential average, and historians are divided on whether his weight ever made it into the triple digits. Legend has it that he gave speeches from a podium made out of an old shoe box and was sworn in on a deck of cards with a cross drawn on it. He was a tiny little man is our point.
In a media landscape where someone’s gender (Hillary “No Balls” Clinton) or embarrassing flop sweat (Richard “Slimer” Nixon) can be a political death sentence, itty-bitty Madison would have been eaten alive by the likes of Rush Limbaugh (quite literally if Limbaugh mistook him for a Keebler elf). If you don’t think size matters, chew on this statistic: Up to and including the election of Barack Obama, the taller of the two candidates for president has won the election 88 percent of the time. Those are betting odds, friends. It seems voters just don’t cotton to a presidential candidate they can squat press.
3. GROVER “OLD NONCONSECUTIVELY” CLEVELAND
How beloved was he?
Enough to win the popular vote three times and get elected twice, nonconsecutively. That means we dumped Grover, went out with another president for a while, then came crawling back, just like he said we would in his campaign speeches and in all those sobbing voice-mail messages.
Why today’s media would destroy him
He pulled a Woody Allen while in office. Cleveland married a woman twenty-eight years younger than him, whom he had helped raise from infancy, in the White House itself. While the fourth estate would have a field day with that today, that kind of thing didn’t faze the sexual progressives of the 1880s, because Cleveland remained popular despite a campaign by his opponents calling out an illegitimate he’d sired while a lawyer in New York. Their unofficial slogan “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” was deftly countered by Cleveland’s own “Gone to the White House. Kiss my ass!”
Illegitimate children? Baby wife? Man, that’s what today’s media would refer to as, “Oh my God, this is so juicy I think I’m having a heart attack.”
2. FRANKLIN “KING OF AMERICA” ROOSEVELT
How beloved was he?
FDR got us out of the Depression and into