There Have Been Rockier Transitions Than This One

Larry Sabato: “Truly, has there ever been as dramatic a contrast between outgoing and incoming chief executives as Barack Obama and Donald Trump? Actually, yes: the refined John Quincy Adams and the rough-hewn populist Andrew Jackson despised each other. Jackson believed he had been cheated out of the White House by a corrupt bargain during 1824’s House of Representatives “run-off” that installed Adams as president. Jackson spent four years making sure that wrong was righted on Inauguration Day 1829.”

“Other jarring transfers of power surely include the ones between the timid, indecisive James Buchanan, doing nothing while seven states left the Union, and Abraham Lincoln, who saved the Union in a bloody civil war (1861); the scholarly, erudite Woodrow Wilson and the tawdry, careless Warren G. Harding (1921); Herbert Hoover, a great humanitarian but hapless president, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gave people hope and sustenance through the depths of the Great Depression (1933); and Jimmy Carter, tortured by a bad economy and the Iranian hostage crisis that persisted to the moment of Ronald Reagan’s oath-taking in 1981.”