July 31, 2007
Department of Useless Presidential Trivia II Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:00 PM EST I’ll add one or two quick observations to Joshua Zeitz’s post this morning. There is at least one additional scenario in 2008 that would pit two natives of the same state against each other in the presidential election, and it’s a good deal more likely than a Gore versus Thompson contest. If Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are nominated by their respective parties—a fair, if not at all certain prospect at this point—you would end up with the subway series of presidential elections. As Mr. Zeitz notes, there has not been a home-state throwdown of this variety since 1944, when a different pair of New Yorkers fought for the Presidency. (Arguably, the 1992 election should qualify, since Ross Perot and George Bush were both Texans, albeit of different sorts.) It would be funny and maybe even appropriate if Clinton and Giuliani were the next two candidates to contest the same home state. For New Yorkers like myself, this outcome would be sweet recompense for the fact that our state hasn’t produced a presidential nominee since Thomas Dewey. The closest we’ve come to the Oval Office in the last 60 years has been with the brief Vice Presidency of Nelson Rockefeller, and the vice-presidential candidacies of Bill Miller, Geraldine Ferraro, and Jack Kemp. An even sweeter and more entertaining scenario that could play out, and that would, to my knowledge, be truly unprecedented, might actually pit three candidates from the same state against one another in an Empire State battle royale. If Mayor Michael Bloomberg runs as a third-party candidate against Clinton and Giuliani, the whole country will be resentfully singing “New York, New York” all through 2008. The winner of that contest would be anyone’s guess.
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