Elections that changed America

There are few presidential elections that can match today's for excitement. Barack Obama's candidacy shattered a glass ceiling for black politicians, John McCain goes into the record books as the oldest first-term candidate ever fielded by a major political party in the US, and Sarah Palin takes her place as the first woman put up by the Republicans as a candidate for either of the two main offices.

Whether it is a turning point in US history to match the election of Ronald Reagan, 28 years ago, remains to be seen. Reagan was like McCain in certain respects. He was 68 years old, making him at the time the oldest serious contender for the White House and someone outside the normal Republican establishment, who had been narrowly and perhaps unfairly denied the chance to be the party's election four years earlier.

What gave the 1980 contest its edge was the dangerous international situation, which looked more threatening then than the Afghanistan war and the Iraq insurgency do now. It involved the same parts of the world. Afghanistan had just been invaded by the USSR, hotting up the cold war, and a revolution in Iran had brought Ayatollah Khomeini to supreme power.

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What finished the incumbent President, Jimmy Carter, was the public humiliation of the occupation of the US embassy by radical Islamic students, who took 90 Americans hostage. In April, Carter authorised an attempt to rescue them by force. If the US Marines had pulled it off, there might have never have been a President Ronald Reagan. But it ended in humiliation, and the hostages were still imprisoned until just after the formal start of the Reagan presidency, in January. The country turned to Reagan as the man who would uphold US power around the world.

There was a very different public mood 20 years earlier, when the young Senator John F. Kennedy took on Richard Nixon, who had served as Vice-President for the previous eight years. Kennedy had many of the apparent disadvantages that Obama had at the start of his campaign. He was exceptionally young, only 43 years old, and his family background was wrong for the job; he was descended from Irish Catholics, in a country which had never had a Catholic President.

But Kennedy generated the same sense of excitement, of a new dawn, that Obama brought to the 2008 campaign. He was the first President to flaunt his friendship with Hollywood stars, such as Marilyn Monroe. More importantly, he represented a break with the postwar anti-communist hysteria of which Nixon was a living symbol.

This was the first election in which television played a critical role. The two main candidates agreed to a televised debate, in which Nixon looked uncomfortable and shifty, while Kennedy – like Obama – seemed relaxed and in control. Singificantly, those who listened to the dabtes on radio thought Nixon had won.

But neither of those contests was perhaps as important as the election of 1932, which brought Franklin D. Roosevelt to office. It was fought against the background of the Great Depression, a downturn much worse than the one now threatening the US, and brought to office a President on whose watch the Second World War broke out.

Before Roosevelt's election, it was an unchallenged assumption in Washington that the government should never spend more than it raised in taxes, a doctrine which worsened the Depression. Roosevelt campaigned on a promise of a New Deal, which was going to create jobs through public projects funded by government borrowing. Some of his opponents thought this was close to communism, but the economic situation was so dire that the voters were ready to take that risk.

The question that dominated the extraordinary election of 1912 was what must have seemed to many like a remote dispute about the independence of the judiciary. The incumbent President, Howard Taft, believed in it. His old friend, the ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, thought the lawyers should be reined in. The result was a dramatic rift in the Republican Party, with Taft and Roosevelt both running for President, handing victory to the Democrat, an obscure 55-year-old lawyer and academic named Woodrow Wilson. He was the first southerner to be elected president. Taft, meanwhile, remains the only President ever to come third when running for a second term.

But for sheer drama, nothing has ever matched the election of 1860, which was dominated by the issue of slavery. The Democrats, strange as it may now seem, were the pro-slavery party. The Republican Party was then only six years old, having been formed by Abraham Lincoln and others in 1854, not to abolish slavery, but to prevent it spreading from the southern cotton-growing states into new territories further west.

Lincoln was under fire from both sides in his own party. Some accused him of being too intransigent towards the slave-owners, others accused him of selling out. He was attempting the impossible – to break the political power of the slave-owners without breaking up the union. He won entirely on votes cast in the north; in several southern states he was not even on the ballot paper. Less than two months after the election, and before he had formally taken office, South Carolina announced that it was seceding from the US, and barely a month after his inauguration, the USA was plunged into civil war.