Presidential rematches have been good, bad and ugly

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Awful disasters are often redeemed — if only slightly — by being interesting. That's the excuse for storytellers' (including journalists') fascination with them.

The Titanic's maiden voyage made a much more compelling yarn than your average North Atlantic crossing. The explosion aboard Apollo 13 and its harrowing return to earth created the highest adventure of all the moon missions. Custer's Last Stand was by far his most exciting battle.

But somehow the horribly increasing possibility of a Joe Biden/Donald Trump rematch in the 2024 presidential campaign is a looming disaster that offers little hope for any such silver lining. Far from interesting, such a replay would almost certainly be dreary, disgraceful and demeaning from start to finish — and then one of the embarrassments would win.

Even so, we must try to keep up our spirits. Rematches, though unknown in recent decades, have a storied history in American presidential politics. Fact is, some 20% of all presidential contests have constituted one end of a doubleheader. Thus the threat of a second clown-car collision between a bore and a boor can at least remind us of genuinely interesting events.

A whirlwind tour through the annals of presidential sequels may prove amusing while reassuring us that our politics once had at least a semblance of dignity and substance — and perhaps one day could have them again.

1796/1800: Two of the smarter and more accomplished statesmen in all of history squared off in America's first two-round title bout — charming, brilliant, self-indulgent Thomas Jefferson; and prickly, brilliant, austere John Adams. In the process they solidified the first version of the nation's two-party political tradition and its vital principle of the peaceful transfer of power.

Adams, George Washington's vice president, won the White House in 1796 over Jefferson, Washington's secretary of state. Adams headed the Federalists, a party of mainly northeastern nationalists and advocates of an emerging commercial/industrial America. Jefferson ousted Adams four years later leading the Democratic-Republicans, chiefly southern agrarians skeptical of central government and a modernizing economy.

There was plenty of bitterness and chicanery, but peaceful regime change worked — a legacy our latter-day generation has learned cannot be taken for granted.

In later years Adams and Jefferson were even able to renew the cordial friendship (and cordial disagreements) first forged as revolutionary comrades and only temporarily spoiled by political combat.

1824/1828: Another prickly, brilliant and austere Adams — John Quincy, the second president's son, was one of the duelists in another harsh and momentous two-part clash that produced what historians call the Second Party System.

After the Federalists went extinct, the younger Adams, despite his New England heritage and nationalist sympathies, rode a distinguished diplomatic career to the leadership of the Jeffersonian party. In 1824 he won the presidency over flamboyant frontier populist Andrew Jackson, but only through a deadlock-breaking House vote. Jackson thundered that the election had been stolen, vowed revenge, and got it, unseating Adams after an 1828 campaign that may have been the nastiest in U.S. history.

Adams was alleged to have served as a pimp to the czar while serving in Russia. Jackson was called an adulterer and murderer (as a frequent literal duelist). The strain of it all may have killed Jackson's wife, who died before his inauguration. Adams was later elected to Congress, where he became one of its most eloquent critics of slavery.

But if the tale reminds us that no excess is entirely new in our politics, the "Jacksonian" coalition did usher in something different. More Americans than ever were voting (more white men, anyway) and they were common men, rough around the edges, resentful of elites — the deplorables of their time. They would make a lot of news, then as now.

1836/1840: They got started in 1840, by refusing to re-elect Martin Van Buren, Jackson's trusted vice president and political mastermind. Van Buren had beaten Whig William Henry Harrison in 1836, but Harrison turned the tables four years later.

Oddly, Harrison triumphed in the rematch as the heavily hyped "Log Cabin Candidate," by virtue of having spent a few Indian war campaigns in spartan frontier accommodations. By background he was a Virginia aristocrat, scion of one of the great tidewater plantations. Van Buren was skewered as an effete ruffled-shirt manipulator, though actually he was a self-made tavern keepers' son. It was a campaign of humbug, but the voters liked humbug.

Again, nothing's really new. Harrison also was old for his era, at 68 the oldest newly elected president before Ronald Reagan. He fell ill and died 31 days after taking office.

1858/1860: Not exactly a presidential rematch, but perhaps the most momentous political rivalry in U.S. history involved Illinois statesmen Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas won their 1858 tilt for the U.S. Senate, the contest that produced the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates and Lincoln's "House Divided" speech. Two years later they were the leading contenders for the White House in a fractured four-candidate struggle in which Lincoln prevailed with less that 40% of the nationwide popular vote. Civil War followed (and Douglas stayed loyal to the union).

1888/1892: Of 12 presidential elections beginning with Lincoln's victory, the new Republican Party won 10, its streak broken only by reformist Democrat Grover Cleveland. He won in 1884 but was ousted in 1888 by Benjamin Harrison, William Henry's grandson. Four years later Cleveland returned the favor, unseating Harrison and becoming the only president, so far, to be both defeated and victorious in bids for a second term.

1896/1900: Three of the Democrats' 10 defeats in their wilderness half-century were suffered by Midwestern populist William Jennings Bryan. Twice he was beaten by William McKinley, a mild mannered creature of the growing big business class. Bryan was the voice of an earlier America decrying the Gilded Age, a moralist, pacifist and evangelist — the foe of Darwinists, industrialists and imperialists everywhere. He lost every time.

1952/1956: After a long hiatus, the presidential doubleheader returned in the 1950s. The GOP, having endured its own lengthy exile from Washington power, renewed itself behind the smiling centrist leadership of Dwight Eisenhower, the great military hero of his century, the World War II generation's answer to Ulysses S. Grant and George Washington. Nobody was going to beat Ike, but brainy and courtly Adlai Stevenson Jr. twice brought grace and style to the business of being trounced.

No clear pattern suggests itself. Presidential rubber matches have produced split decisions a little more often than sweeps. They have involved some of America's greatest leaders, and others who are mostly, and best, forgotten. Do-overs have unfolded at profound turning points in the nation's life, and during periods of calm and drift.

Maybe the only moral to the story is the old reliable one that the country has been through a lot, survived a lot, and maybe, just maybe, can even survive what lies ahead.