Political novices should consider history

Polls show that a majority of Republican presidential primary voters prefer a candidate who's never held elective office. Since its founding, the Republican Party has nominated five such candidates for the presidency.

The good news for today's Republicans who favor the outsiders Ben Carson, Donald Trump, or Carly Fiorina is that four of the previous five Republican never-been-elected-before nominees have won the office - Ulysses S. Grant, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight Eisenhower.

The bad news is that, unlike any of today's trio, each successful nominee had either previously served in the federal government or held high military office in time of war.

Grant and Eisenhower were commanding generals in the wars that defined their generations. William Howard Taft had been U.S. solicitor general, a federal appellate judge, secretary of war, and governor-general of the Philippines.

Herbert Hoover had distinguished himself as the head of the U.S. Food Administration in World War I and as a long-serving, innovative secretary of commerce.

Unlike these four, the only loser among the never previously elected nominees, businessman Wendell Wilkie, was never in the government nor a general. He was crushed in the 1940 election, receiving only 82 electoral votes compared to 449 for Franklin Roosevelt.

Political precedent doesn't bind the future and today's communication and social media tools are rewriting electoral playbooks. On the other hand, as the philosopher George Santayana famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Bob Foys

Inverness