Remembering history the way they wished it had been
One Man, Our Vote 
Greg Grandlin offers a roundup of one interested party’s role in the last twelve presidential elections, and perhaps on his last one.
“Fidel Castro, the First Superdelegate” clocks el Lider Maximo’s walk-ons and cameos over five decades.
Vote Early & Vote Often 
Ship of Fools 
A Georgia Democratic Senate candidate says his failed efforts to keep the Presidential Yacht Sequoia safe for Washington cocktail parties are a credential for office. 
Josh Lanier was Executive Trustee of the Presidential Yacht Trust, one of the parade of troubled entities owning the yacht in the years since President Carter sold it. This collection of Washington worthies had visions of putting the ship back on the public tab after gussying it up, but the Sequoia ended up sold to a shipyard.
Since then another owner has gussied it up, rents it for parties, and flirts with selling it back to the feds.
It’s Alive! 
As President’s Day morphed into All Presidents, All The Time Day, its just gotten weirder and more unwieldy.
Republicans try to shoehorn Reagan in with fellow February Birthday Boys Washington and Lincoln, while complaining that one day really doesn’t do the lads justice. And lament the passing of glorious days of old when we heard of Lincoln learning to read by the light of a single lump of coal.
Meanwhile at the Carter Library they’ve gone beyond mere days to celebrate “President’s Month“!
For you all you Presidential who-went-where-when obsessives, The 48th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry/ Civil War Musings blog has a roundup on Presidential visits to the Antietam battlefield near Washington.
With the special bonus of extensively documenting future President McKinley’s participation in the battle, where he heroically shuffled coffee to the front lines under fire.
Blanket Agreement 
Yet another thing we can blame on the nation’s most distinguished placeholder, Gerry Ford. After he left office!
Along with doing down Reagan, Nixon, much of the 70s, and the Clintons, Ford in the tell-all “Write It When I’m Gone” lets it be known that he was responsible for the North American Free Trade Agreement.
It happened at a 1993 Clinton sleepover in Colorado.
“Up until that point, President Clinton cared less about NAFTA. He wasn’t interested. I spent most of my time with him promoting NAFTA, urging him to take action, to get going … I honestly can claim full credit for getting him off dead center on NAFTA,” Ford recalled in May 1994. “Now, once he got interested, he did a damn good job. He twisted arms, he browbeat Democrats and he put on a good event in the East Room with Carter, Bush and myself. You know, he’s a helluva salesman.”
And the blessings poured fourth! Ourmostathleticpresident
can take the credit and the blame.
For fashion icon Subcomandante Marcos… 
…but also for the NAFTA Superhighway maps which infest the web
[choose one!] 
The blessings continue today. The new year saw the fall of more barriers to American agriculture crushing Mexican farmers.
Wherever did all those farmers go?
The problem with Gerry’s story is that Clinton endorsed NAFTA before the 1992 election. So never-mind.
