[Van Buren’s] respect for fellow outsiders was such that he retained on his ticket a vice president, Richard M. Johnson, who was living quite openly with a black mistress and his two children from an earlier affair with a slave woman he’d inherited from his father. Now there’s the germ of a screenplay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Consider today’s modern vetting process for prospective running mates. Would-be VPs have every detail of their lives dissected by teams of lawyers and researchers, looking for the slightest hint of scandal. Now consider the fact that Martin Van Buren tapped a VP who cared little who knew about his affair with his black mistress and the children he bore from a slave.<\/p>\n
Today’s political environment is dismissed as a moral cesspool, as we slouch towards Gomorrah, but the reality is today’s political figures are practically saints<\/em> when compared to their predecessors from 19th century America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I sometimes get the impression that people believe today’s politicians are scandal-ridden scoundrels while our leaders of yesteryear were paragons of virtue. The reality is generally the exact opposite. I was reminded of this point while reading Georgetown’s Michael Kazin’s terrific review in the New York Times yesterday on Ted Widmer’s new biography on Martin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}