Serious and silly, unifying and polarizing, presidential elections
have become events that Americans love and hate. Today's elections
cost billions of dollars and consume the nation's attention for
months, filling television airwaves and online media with endless
advertising and political punditry, often heated, vitriolic, and
petty. Yet presidential elections also provoke and inspire mass
engagement of ordinary citizens in the political system. No matter
how frustrated or disinterested voters might be about politics and
government, every four years, on the first Tuesday in November, the
attention of the nation-and the world-focuses on the candidates,
the contest, and the issues. The partisan election process has been
a way for a messy, jumbled, raucous nation to come together as a
slightly-more-perfect union. Pivotal Tuesdays looks back at four
pivotal presidential elections of the past 100 years to show how
they shaped the twentieth century. During the rowdy, four-way race
in 1912 between Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Eugene Debs,
and Woodrow Wilson, the candidates grappled with the tremendous
changes of industrial capitalism and how best to respond to them.
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt's promises to give Americans a "New
Deal" to combat the Great Depression helped him beat the
beleaguered incumbent, Herbert Hoover. The dramatic and tragic
campaign of 1968 that saw the election of Richard Nixon reflected
an America divided by race, region, and war and set in motion
political dynamics that persisted into the book's final story-the
three-way race that led to Bill Clinton's 1992 victory. Exploring
the personalities, critical moments, and surprises of these races,
Margaret O'Mara shows how and why candidates won or lost and
examines the effects these campaigns had on the presidencies that
followed. But this isn't just a book about politics. It is about
the evolution of a nation and the history made by ordinary people
who cast their ballots.
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