Most enlightened men now recognize that General Jackson is not fitted to fill the office of President; his limited experience of anything to do with civil government and his great age make him incompetent.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
But the admiration for Jackson was by no means confined to his own soldiers and to his own section.
After the 1960s and '70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country's highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.
For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.
I think Joe Jackson is a great American figure. In my opinion, he became a scapegoat.
A President needs political understanding to run the government, but he may be elected without it.
Jackson was not a religious man when he came to Lexington.
Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president - pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome of federal social engineering that costs too much and does too little.
Jackson, however, persevered. He joined the Franklin Debating Society, an institution that had been in existence over fifty years, and had enrolled in its membership some of the ablest men in Virginia.
Henry M. Jackson, congressman and senator from 1941 until his death in 1983, achieved far greater renown than most legislators, ran for president in 1972 and 1976, and was for much of the 1970s and 1980s one of the most powerful men in America.
Andrew Jackson was the first president to claim that the desires of the public overrode Congress's constitutional prerogatives. Virtually every president since Jackson has claimed the mantle, even while lacking two ingredients of an electoral mandate: a landslide victory and a specific agenda.