It is difficult these days to keep our heads. Passions are engaged.
Salacious revelations stir the body politic.
Yet this is the perfect occasion to stop, catch our breath and gain some historical perspective by examining the anatomy of a previous presidential scandal. Grover Cleveland was not a brilliant man, but he was a competent, respected lawyer with a well-earned reputation for incorruptibility. Splits in the dominant Republican Party had made possible a political success story of Cinderella proportions. Cleveland was elected mayor of Buffalo and then governor of New York and then was nominated by the Democrats of 1884 as a fighting, reform candidate. He was considered to have a decent chance of beating the Republican, James G. Blaine, whose reputation for political corruption was widely acknowledged.